Ethos and Narrative Interpretation

Liesbeth Korthals Altes is a professor of general literature in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She is the author or coeditor of several books including Authorship Revisited: Conceptions of Authorship around 1900 and 2000 and The Autonomy of Literature at the Fins de SiÈcles (1900 and 2000): A Critical Assessment.

• PrefaceWhy Ethos? Part 1. Ethos, Narrative, and the Social Construction of Meanings and Values1. Literary Interpretation, Ethos Attributions, and the Negotiation of Values in Culture2. Ethos as a Social Construction: Authorial Posturing, Conceptions of Literature, and Value RegimesPart 2. Ethos in Narratology: The Return of the Repressed3. Narratology between Hermeneutics and Cognitive Science4. Key Concepts Revised: Narrative and Communication, Embeddedness, Intentionality, Fictionality, and Reading Strategies5. Whose Ethos? Characters, Narrators, Authors, and Unadopted DiscoursePart 3. Further Explorations: Contracts and Ethos Expectations6. Generic Framing and Authorial Ethos7. Sincerity and Other IroniesOn Narrative, Ethos, and EthicsNotesWorks CitedIndex

"Ethos and Narrative Interpretation . . . succeeds in presenting a type of narrative reading that opens new directions, while never forgetting to have a new close look at the basic issues of the discipline."-Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews "I can highly recommend Ethos and Narrative Interpretation to experienced researchers in the fields of narratology and hermeneutics, and also to scholars who are interested in thinking about the place of literary studies in today’s society: the book provides a number of very convincing answers to the important question of why study literature."-Jan Alber, Style "With its emphasis on ethos and the negotiation of values, this book will have a lasting impact on the way in which narratology redefines its core concerns. By grounding her argument in rhetoric, Korthals Altes offers a methodological alternative to text-oriented readings, while her insistence on the importance of values adds a new dimension to existing rhetorical approaches in narratology."—Roy Sommer, author of Literature and Memory