| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation grows from my own dissatisfactions with those agonistic models of argumentation and communication which require the speaker or writer to assume an ethos that some (e.g. Wayne Booth; Jim Corder) have described as ¿authoritative.¿ Marked by what Kevin Bradt calls ¿representational language,¿ where truth can be unproblematically conveyed through propositional declarations, the authoritative speaker or writer assumes congruence between language and reality and, therefore, often confuses ¿an intellectual tool with reality.¿ My attempt to imagine an alternative to the authoritative ethos begins with a broad definition of ¿story.¿ Drawing from Mary Paumier Jones's idea that narrative, theory, and metaphor are all kinds of stories, I set forth a theory of discourse which sees all knowledge as ¿storied.¿ The central contention of the dissertation is that such a theory has a chance of remedying the disingenuousness an authoritative ethos requires. This theory, which I have termed ¿narrative ways of knowing,¿ assumes the following four things: first, we are all storytellers; second, there are many ways to tell stories; third, there are many ways to tell a story; and, finally, all knowledge is storied. In chapter one, I address the problem of authoritativeness and discuss briefly the possible implications of seeing all knowledge as ¿storied.¿ In chapter two, I lay out a vision of discourse which supports the idea of narrative ways of knowing; chapters three and four serve as illustrations of that vision. In chapter three, I discuss Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Christa Wolf's Cassandra as examples of ¿narrative arguments,¿ where, I contend, the assumptions of narrative ways of knowing are made integral parts of the authors, arguments. Chapter four focuses on talk about one's own social class as an illustration of the ways in which narratives become arguments. I conclude, in chapter five, with a detailed discussion of the ways in which story serves as a countermeasure against the authoritative ethos, where all knowledge-making is squarely faced with questions of ethics and construction, and where quick and inflammatory statements of right and wrong, true and false, are displaced¿at least momentarily¿by discussions about who's telling and what they're seeing, and about the stories and ways of storytelling that dictate what comes into view. | |
