Rhetorical Narratives, Tableaux, and Scenarios: Work-Notes on Narrative Poetics in Shenoutean Sahidic Coptic

In the course of an exploratory study of ‘Shenoute’s rhetorical syntax’, a comprehensive investigation of the syntactic poetics of rhetorical complexes (the grammatical high-order signifiers, for which the signified ‘added-value’ is ‘rhetoricity’), I have encountered a textemic set of rhetorical narrative structures which, I believe, provides important new insights on the grammatical nature, texture, and properties of narrative in general.2 In this, a pilot study, I shall offer a brief overview of this set, attempting a cursory formal-and-functional description of the individual textemes, and present representative and selective token documentation (usually not more than a single example for each category; more, sometimes many more are attested).3 Statements made here have no claim to be universally valid, but are meant to describe the Coptic situation. For reasons of space, I have left out most of the secondary literature, whether literary, narratological or linguistic stricto sensu; the types discussed are selective, out of the numerous types in my files: I wish here to draw attention to this rich vein of syntactical and stylistic data, to their variety and intricacy, to offer a provisional typology and observations on distinctive grammatical properties, and perhaps to stimulate debate. The writings of Shenoute (c. AD 348textendashc. AD 465) are the most extensive authentic (i.e. untranslated) corpus of Sahidic Coptic and Coptic in general, a corpus which (although always appreciated for its high stylistic, literary, and rhetorical sophistication), has in the last decade of the last century gained in scholarly attention, and is currently being re-edited and retranslated as a joint international project.