Persuasion

This chapter looks at humor’s role in narrative persuasion through the prism of enactive cognition (one of the E’s of 4E cognition). Enactive cognition invites us to understand our experience of what we read like other experiences that reach back into our affect, intellect, and memories and extend forward, becoming a part of how we will experience the world in the future. This chapter argues that authors use humor to persuade in the novel form by inviting readers into the experience of their narratives. The first section describes how Trollope in Rachel Ray , Eliot in “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” and Oliphant in “The Rector” engage in persuasion through a humorous reorientation of religious priorities. The second section looks at Dickens’ use of comic symbolism and satire to argue against utilitarianism in Hard Times , and Trollope’s critique of Dickens’ rhetorical techniques in The Warden . The persuasive aspects of these texts do not have special power in propositional form; rather, this chapter describes how their persuasive power is in their gestalt form as stories; the only way ‘to know’ their arguments is to experience them through reading.