James Phelan (literary scholar)

James Phelan (born 1951) is an American writer and literary scholar of narratology. He is a third-generation Neo-Aristotelian literary critic of the Chicago School whose work builds on and refines the work of Wayne C. Booth, with a focus on the rhetorical aspects of narrative. He is Distinguished University Professor of English at the Ohio State University.

Phelan is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (2016) and has been granted an honorary Ph.D degree from Aarhus University in Denmark (2013). In 2021, Phelan received the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. 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. 

Phelan 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.

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. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol on Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012). In 2020 he collaborated with Matthew Clark on Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative. In this book Clark responds to Phelan's previously published ideas about these aspects, especially in Reading People, Reading Plots, and then Phelan replies to Clark. In 2018, the journal Style devoted a special double issue to his work: Phelan wrote a "target essay" (based on the theoretical argument of Somebody Telling Somebody Else), twenty-five others wrote short responses, and then Phelan replied to those responses. Phelan has also edited or co-edited several collections including the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (2005, co-edited with Peter J. Rabinowitz), Teaching Narrative Theory (2010, co-edited with David Herman and Brian McHale), and Fictionality in Literature: Core Concepts Revisited (2022, co-edited with Lasse Gammelgaard, Stefan Iversen, Louise Brix Jakobsen, Richard Walsh, Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen, and Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen). With Peter J. Rabinowitz, Phelan co-edited the Ohio State University Press book series, The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative from 1993-2019. He now continues as co-editor with Katra Byram and Faye Halpern. Born in Flushing, NY, Phelan graduated in 1972 with a BA in English from Boston College. At BC he played on the basketball team, earning Academic All-American honors in 1972.

In 1991 he wrote a memoir called Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor. Along with Frederick Aldama, Brian McHale, and David Herman, he founded Project Narrative, an initiative at Ohio State University.