Ancient pronuntiatio and Genette’s “dégre zéro” in Gothic Writing

Abstract

This essay challenges prevailing assumptions about the role of rhetoric in narrative fiction, arguing that rhetorical delivery – pronuntiatio, the embodied performance of speech – can serve as a generative force in novelistic form. Rather than treating rhetorical figures as ornament or residue, the essay theorizes the novel as a system in which language builds toward climactic acts of speech, moments where form and voice converge. Drawing on both classical rhetorical theory and Gérard Genette’s concept of the “zero figure,” in which emotional intensity is conveyed through the suspension or minimization of figure, the analysis traces how rhetorical energy shapes the structure and affective trajectory of the American gothic novel. Through close readings of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), the essay shows how these rhetorically-saturated texts ultimately construct speech as a transformative event, where moments of pronuntiatio offer both formal and spiritual resolution.