EMOTIONAL LIFE, RHETORIC, AND ROLES

From a narrative perspective, I suggest restructuring our understandin g of the phenomena of emotions by broadening the conception of emotion s to emotional life. I make the claim that emotional life is storied; further, that metaphors drawn from the discipline of rhetoric are indi spensable to an understanding of emotional life. I make use of the dis tinction between dramaturgical rhetoric and dramatistic rhetoric to id entify the rhetorical acts in which the actor is the author of a concu rrent script (dramaturgical) from those for which the authorship is lo cated in cultural narratives (dramatistic). In conceptualizing emotion al life as arising from patterned efforts to resolve moral issues, I t urn to role theory to fashion a construction-moral identity roles-as p arallel to, but not the same as, social-identity roles.