C. Dale Young: Doubt and Uncertainty: The Interrogative Gesture as Rhetorical Strategy (July 2016)

Writers often feel the drive to be convincing in their poetry and fiction. But often, the way to convince a reader is by constructing a speaker or narrator who “seems real” to a reader. Focusing on the interrogative, C. Dale Young’s lecture looks at passages from Elizabeth Bishop, Carl Phillips, Flannery O’Connor, William Butler Yeats, and others to investigate how the aim to be convincing might be achieved within the architectures of uncertainty and doubt.