Professor of Comparative Literature Peter J. Rabinowitz gave a plenary talk at the First International Narratological Conference, sponsored by the Jiangxi Academy of Social Sciences, and held in Nanchang in October. Rabinowitz, one of only six foreign scholars invited to the conference, delivered a paper titled "Understanding Rhetorical Nuance: Western Music and Narrative Theory."
Arguing that certain tools developed by rhetorical narrative theorists can be applied to musical works as well as verbal narratives, Rabinowitz, who chairs the Comparative Literature Department at Hamilton, went on to show how the concepts of fictionality and focalization can help us understand the structural sources of the irony in Mozart's A Musical Joke. The conference followed the publication of the Chinese translation of A Companion to Narrative Theory, co-edited by Rabinowitz and James Phelan. Besides Rabinowitz and Phelan, two other contributors to that volume were among the six Western theorists who appeared at the conference.
Arguing that certain tools developed by rhetorical narrative theorists can be applied to musical works as well as verbal narratives, Rabinowitz, who chairs the Comparative Literature Department at Hamilton, went on to show how the concepts of fictionality and focalization can help us understand the structural sources of the irony in Mozart's A Musical Joke. The conference followed the publication of the Chinese translation of A Companion to Narrative Theory, co-edited by Rabinowitz and James Phelan. Besides Rabinowitz and Phelan, two other contributors to that volume were among the six Western theorists who appeared at the conference.
