Inventions of Reading : : Rhetoric and the Literary Imagination / / Clayton Koelb.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Koelb, Clayton,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1988
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 p.)
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; Preface --; 1. Ways of Beginning --; 2. Rhetorical Moments --; 3. Facts and Figures --; 4. The Stuff of Rhetoric --; 5. Constructive Reading --; 6. The Rhetoric of Ethical Engagement --; 7. Conclusion --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9781501743979; 9783110536171
• DOI: 10.7591/9781501743979
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Clayton Koelb.

Where do writers of fiction get their ideas? Clayton Koelb here takes issue with those who regard inspiration or imitation as primary forces influencing literary invention. He finds that another mechanism, which he calls "rhetorical construction," underlies much fiction and some nonfiction as well.Rhetorical construction, Koelb says, is a way of producing writing out of reading. The rhetorical writer begins by discovering an interpretive crux in a familiar text-a passage from the Bible, for example, or a commonplace expression—and then proceeds to imagine a fictional situation in which all the meanings of the passage, contradictory though they may seem, may be realized. According to Koelb, "inventions of reading" do not stop with the discovery of the eternal and inevitable deconstructibility of language; they somehow generate an urge to put language back together through the invention of a fictional world. Among the texts he discusses are writings by Boccaccio, Rabelais, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hawthorne, Hans Christian Andersen Nietzsche, Kafka, Calvino, and Flannery O'Connor.