Resurrecting the Narrative Paradigm: Identification and the Case of Young Earth Creationism

Abstract

This article extends the work of conceptual revision of the narrative paradigm in order to more directly and completely account for the inventional possibilities of new narratives, the rhetorical revision of old narratives, and the appeal and acceptance of improbable narrative accounts. It does so by reconceptualizing Burke's concept of identification in the narrative paradigm by expanding identification's critical range. Reconceptualizing identification in the narrative paradigm further expands narrative rationality beyond “the logic of good reasons,” provides a theoretical mechanism that accounts for and complements prior theoretical extensions advanced in revision of the narrative paradigm, and provides greater conceptual flexibility for the critical use of narrative in light of poststructuralism. Reconceptualizing the role of identification in the narrative paradigm enriches our understanding of how narratives foster beliefs, attitudes, and actions by accounting more fully for the range of the symbolic resources and processes of identification.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1997 New York State Speech Communication Association Conference in Monticello, New York and at the 2002 Rhetoric Society of America 10th Biennial Conference in Las Vegas, NV. The author wishes to thank Ramie McKerrow, Geoff Leatham, Adam Roth, Stephen Wood, and the Editor for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹See Currie; Phelan and Rabinowitz; Prickett; Punday; and Schechet.

²Fisher set forth his narrative paradigm via a series of articles (1978, 1980, 1982, 1984, and 1985) culminating in his definitive statement on (1978, 1980, 1982, 1984, and 1985) narrative theory in 1987. For a discussion of “the crucial importance” of the narrative paradigm to critics and its many applications see Rowland, “The Narrative Perspective.”

³In addition to the abundant literature in rhetorical theory and criticism, communication scholars have deployed the narrative paradigm in a variety of subject areas including interpersonal communication (Hollihan and Riley); and organizational communication (Mumby; and Stine and Pacanowsky).

⁴In later discussions of narrative, Fisher's focus is on ethics. Nevertheless, Fisher's concepts of probability and fidelity remain unchanged in his extension of narrative to the realm of ethics. See “Narration, Reason, and Community,” “Narration, Knowledge, and the Possibility of Wisdom,” and “The Ethic(s) of Argument.” In particular, Fisher's “ultimate aim is to reconfigure Aristotle's notion of practical wisdom (phronesis)” (“The Ethic(s)” 1).

⁵Fisher seems to indicate that the concepts of probability and fidelity function as the basis of decision making by social actors, at least implicitly, while critics would use them explicitly. See HCN 18–19 and 47–49.

⁶See also Bennett and Eldelman.

⁷Stroud's argument is consistent with Smith and Lybarger's postmodern reconstruction of Bitzer's rhetorical situation model and the adage that rhetoric is the art of “proving opposites.”

⁸I do not want to dissolve, minimize, or disregard contradiction. Antithetical accounts, facts and interpretations of events, ideas, or beliefs (or arguments, as Stroud discusses in the “Narrative as Argument” essay), while they may result in rejections of one or the other antithetical position by auditors (as in polysemic narratives), may indeed enable auditors to engage in “consistency building” that results in synthetic positions (transcendent positions) that incorporate contradictions (as in multivalent narratives). I am, at least in part, accounting theoretically for why people may accept contradictory positions, even counter-factual positions, by drilling down further theoretically than the literature on polysemic, polyvalent, and multivalent narratives has done.

⁹The phase “puzzlements” comes from Kenneth Burke, “Responsibilities of National Greatness.” Clark, in Rhetorical Landscapes, explores the meaning of this phase by Burke and provides an excellent discussion of the full range of the concept of identification in his analysis of the rhetoric of American landscapes.

¹⁰Rowland, in “The Narrative Perspective,” recognizes the significance of identification in narrative but limits his discussion of it to audience identification with the narrator and the narrative.

¹¹ For an informative discussion of the evolution of Burke's development of the concept of identification see Jordan.

¹²See Wess (186–216) and Crusius (34–64) for two representative discussions on the theoretical and philosophical range and implications of Burkean identification.

¹³Crusius (45–58) provides a lucid discussion on Burke's distinctions between reason, the irrational, and the nonrational. In Attitudes Toward History, Burke makes the following useful distinctions between the rational, the irrational, and the non-rational:

Many of our rationalists have made things more difficult and foreboding by confining us to a choice of between … the ‘rational' and the ‘irrational'. But if a tree puts out leaves in the spring and drops them in the autumn, its act is neither rational nor irrational, but non-rational. And so it is with many human processes, even mental ones, like the ‘identification' that the non-heroic reader makes with the hero of the book he is reading. To call such processes ‘irrational' is to desire their elimination. But we question whether social integration can be accomplished without them. (171)

¹⁴For additional information on the multiple interpretations of narratives and the complications of the narrative form in hypertextuality see Bolter; Cali; Dovey; and Douglas.

¹⁵See Barthes; Ott and Cameron; and Long and Strine.

¹⁶Also see Peters.

¹⁷I. A. Richards, in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, explains how the meaning of individual words cannot be established separately from their context. Each individual word's meaning is established by its interaction with the words that lead up to it, that follow it, and that are in the same sentence, paragraph, and piece of writing. Our understanding of a word's meaning is not only constituted by its context but by the words we know and even the words and ideas in the back of our minds that our experience connects with this word, in a particular context; so too with narratives.

¹⁸In their treatment of ideology and subjectivity, Gunn and Treat note that similar to “the concept of ideology, the category of the unconscious has escaped sustained discussion among rhetorical scholars” (160). Following Freud, Gunn and Treat delineate two ways of understanding the unconscious: first, is the adjectival sense, that refers to the latent or temporarily unconscious and can become known to the subject; and second, is the psychical, that we cannot know except in terms of its effects on conscious life. Examples of the latter include “slips of the tongue,” sudden insights such as in the realization of fully formed ideas, and in the phenomenon of post-hypnotic expression (160–161). Gunn, in his analysis of rhetorical fantasy, links the unconscious psychical with the rhetorical constitution of subjectivity noting that:

Theorizing the idea of communication as a psychical fantasy is important because, first, it responds to an increasingly popular, poststructural critique of mediation that jettisons the Self-Other relation central to rhetorical studies. Second, a psycho-analytical understanding of communication explains the reality and persistence of agency while admitting that subjectivity is discursively produced. (2)

¹⁹Much of the discussion in this case study comes from Massimo Pigliucci's Denying Evolution. The selection of Pigliucci's text is based on his brevity and clarity in dissecting the issue. For additional readings on creationism see Brockman; Lienesch; Forrest and Gross; Young and Edis; and Roughgarden.

²⁰There is a spectrum of beliefs in creationism ranging from three versions of a Young Earth Creationism to six versions of an old Earth and each varies in degree as to what they accept from science and the Bible. Intelligent Design is among the old Earth views. For a complete discussion of these versions of creationism see Pigliucci's discussion on the many forms of creationism (36–50).

²¹See Joshua 10:12–14.

²²Most non-fundamentalist Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church accept evolution in varying degrees. In 1997, Pope John Paul II, in a letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, noted that: “new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than hypothesis” (qtf. Pigliucci 42).

²³A 1996 Gallup poll indicates that some “230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity” (qtf. Harris 17).