innocently enough: Story world as rhetorical frame, rhetoric as world

This creative masters thesis considers works from Salvador Plascencia, John Barth, and Joyce Carol Oates in terms of their navigation of the reader-text relationship. In each work, the construction of the story world is discussed as the primary device of the text in constructing its rhetorical relationship to the reader, illustrating a possible interplay between "worldbuilding" and rhetorical structure and discussing "overt" and "covert" self-referential qualities and the texts' efforts to identify the governing logic of the text, which may be internal or external to the story world. Linda Hutcheon's conception of "narcissistic narrative" and a variety of texts discussing the rhetorical positioning of a narrative offer theoretical grounding for the discussion of technique. After this discussion, the same lens is applied to three original short stories, which follow.