Professor of Comparative Literature Peter J. Rabinowitz delivered a paper, "The Absence of Her Voice from that Concord," during a session on the "implied author" at the International Conference on Narrative in Birmingham, England, on June 5. The session, which grew out of debates about the implied author generated at the 2008 Narrative Conference, offered three significantly different perspectives on the validity of the concept, originally developed by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. More ...

Professor of Comparative Literature Peter J. Rabinowitz delivered a paper, "Inside the Text, Outside the Classroom: The Ethics of Narrative Ethics," during a special session at the MLA Convention in San Francisco on Dec. 28. More ...

Professor of Comparative Literature Peter J. Rabinowitz delivered a paper, "Can a Sonata Have an Unreliable Narrator?: Focalization, Style, and Musical Rhetoric," at the International Conference on Narrative in Austin, Texas, on May 4. Intended as a contribution to the on-going theoretical discussions of the value of narrative theory in the analysis of music, the paper argued that the concept of the unreliable narrator—normally viewed as an essentially literary device without any musical equivalent—can illuminate the processes by which we listen to music and can increase our appreciation of music's expressive potential. More ...