Abstract

In The Republic, Plato argues that narrative has no place in the civic discourse of the polis. Aristotle answers Plato in The Poetics, insisting that narrative is a vibrant and important part of civic discourse. In my dissertation I enter this debate, arguing not only that narrative has a place in civic discourse, but that civic discourse may be best understood as an ongoing cultural narrative about the very nature of society and the negotiation of values within that society. ;Referencing the work of Walter Ong, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Kenneth Burke, I argue that rhetoric is an "utterance" or "symbolic action" that takes place and seeks change in that ongoing cultural narrative. Then, expanding on the work of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrecht-Tyteca in The New Rhetoric I develop a heuristic that analyzes narrative form and rhetorical practice as a dialectic. Their clear separation of rhetoric from philosophy in terms of justice, decision, and action echoes the debate between Plato and Aristotle. I draw on this heuristic to examine several current narratives: the narrative of the "social turn" in composition, the narrative of literary discourse, and the narrative of political discourse. Finally, I examine the interaction of personal narrative and civic discourse in post-modernity, particularly as that term is defined by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, and argue that postmodernism can best be defined as a multicultural, rhetorical narrative. ;Though in isolation either rhetoric or narrative may be studied as a form of persuasion , taken together they may be studied as a dialectic, an epistemology or theory of knowledge that each argues, often in quite different ways. I argue that narrative and rhetoric are so intertwined that the study of one is incomplete without the study of the other, and that narrative form and rhetorical practice form a dialectic that resolves questions of value and action in civic discourse