Over on Whatever, John Scalzi pokes a little fun at the folks who (are? profess to be?) thrown out of the Lord of the Rings by the viscosity of the lava in Mount Doom. He makes an excellent point that the suspension of disbelief is a highly personal thing, subject to much head-scratching by observers […]
This will be a short one, I think. In the broader subject of rhetoric, there are five canons, one of which is the systematic search for argument, the Inventio. The subject of stasis, which I discussed last time, comes out of the Inventio. So does the subject of ethos, which I’ll talk about today. These two […]
(If you missed the previous parts, you can start here. Go on, I’ll wait for you. ETA: This post actually stands on its own quite well. Feel free to read this one first then go back, I think you won’t be confused.) This is a long one, but I think important. There are two large […]
If you missed the first two parts, they can be found here: (Part I, Part II) At some point I’ll put together an index page. Two Dimensions of Argument In the previous two parts, I first argued that you can divide arguments in stories up according to whether they try to argue a specific point […]
In my previous post on argument, I talked about what I saw as one basic division in story arguments. I suggested that there were two basic kinds of arguments being made in fiction: where there is a point being put forward, and where the story is being used to explore multiple sides of an argument […]
John P. Murphy 