Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots

• Main Author: Abbott, H Porter
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: DeKalb 01.12.2013
• Subjects: Armed forces; Critics; Fiction; Mansfield, Katherine (1888-1923); Munro, Alice; Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849); Racism; Reading; Rhetoric; Self esteem; War
• ISSN: 0039-4238; 2374-6629

[...]they would include those 20th-century theorists who specialize in what critics themselves miss because they fail to attend to what happens as these texts are processed by consumers (approaches gaining heft from cognitivist cultural and literary studies now on the march). [...]while the plot progression of Kate Chopin's widely praised and widely taught "Désirée's Baby" delivers an indictment of racist hypocrisy, a covert progression running through the tale supports a racist distinction between the inherent virtue of white people and the proclivity for evil that can be transmitted even by a tincture of the blood of black people. In Stephen Crane's "An Episode of War," for example, readers can gain a much fuller and more nuanced understanding of "the meaninglessness of war and the illusory nature of romanticized heroism" (69) by tracking a covert thread revealing the way the soldiers are infantilized and another bringing out how petty personal conflicts dominate the lives they lead under the shadow of a much greater conflict.