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Article: Narrative apostrophe: reading, rhetoric, resistance in Michel Butor's 'La modification' and Julio Cortazar's "Graffiti." (Second-Person Narrative)
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- September 22, 1994
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Northern Illinois University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Narrating with the second-person pronoun is a rhetorical act. Storytellers from "Homer" and Vergil to Laurence Sterne, George Eliot, Michel Butor, and Julio Cortazar have turned to the persuasive force of you to move their audiences. When the narrator addresses characters in his fiction (as "Homer" does Eumaios) or turns to the reader (as Sterne's Tristram Shandy frequently does) or when, as has become more and more frequent in recent fiction, an entire story is told to "you," the protagonist (as in Butor's La modification), there is a departure from the narrative norm. In this article I will focus on one specific type of departure, which I call "narrative apostrophe," ...