James Phelan (literary scholar)

James Phelan (born 1951) is an American writer, literary scholar, and Distinguished University Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He joined the faculty of Ohio State in 1977 after earning his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. At the University of Chicago, he studied with the Chicago School theorists Sheldon Sacks and Wayne Booth. In 2013 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Aarhus University (Denmark), and in 2016 he was inducted into the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 2020 the International Society for the Study of Narrative named him the winner of the 2021 Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award. The citation for the Award reads in part,"Phelan has influenced generations of narrative theorists and literary scholars, as he has provided a powerful model for thinking about the purposes of literature and reasons and methods to engage with it. In so doing, he has transformed and energized the interdisciplinary field of narrative studies." The recording of the Award ceremony from the May 2021 ISSN Conference can be found at the Society's website. The editor of Narrative (the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative) since its inception in 1993, Phelan has written numerous books and articles on narrative theory that together offer a detailed elaboration of what it means to conceive of narrative as rhetoric. He encapsulates that conception in his default definition of narrative as "somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened." Phelan's books include Worlds from Words (1981), Reading People, Reading Plots (1989), Narrative as Rhetoric (1996), Living to Tell about It (2005), Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (2007),"Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010" (2013) and Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017), and ' 'Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx' '. He has collaborated with David Herman, Peter J.