ABSTRACT
The rhetoric of narrative, then, is the theory of how narrative can be used to persuade and to inform. Social contexts in which discourses occur are essential components to understanding their persuasive potential, even though some discourses transcend their original, real-historical, generative contexts and speak persuasively to later times and different places and people. A general rhetorical theory of narrative is both possible and useful, because it raises not the question of what a particular narrative means or what effect it has, but questions of how narrative as a form has potentials to inform and persuade that differ from other language forms. Rhetoric also has high relevance to hermeneutic philosophy and critical theory, insofar as those branches of philosophy are concerned with analyzing language to understand its social power. A sociology of narrative is not a sociolinguistics of narrative. Finally, the mobility of narratives from medium to medium is an aspect of a sociology of narrative that discloses access.
