ÉTHOS Y PÁTHOS EN LA CONFIGURACIÓN NARRATIVA DE EL ASNO DE ORO, DE APULEYO

Abstract

In this paper, we start from the hypothesis that ethos and pathos can constitute factors of argumentative discourse within the general narrative world of the Roman novel. In it, the main narrator and the occasional narrators construct their identity through this dimension in order to regulate the criteria of truth/fiction and, the rest of the actants do it to achieve the delectare of the novel, by means of these rhetorical strategies of subjectivity. The theoretical framework of the present topic is inscribed, on the one hand, in the characterization of the affective pistis found in the Rhetoric and the Topics of Aristotle, brought to Rome by the academic and Stoic tradition, and definitively configured in De oratore, Orator and Cicero's Topic. In this tradition, the arguments based on the ethos move through the credibility of the speaker, those based on the pathos, instead, move from the passions of the audience. On the other hand, contemporary rhetoric has revised the ancient notions of ethos and pathos observing the way in which the persuasive topics that operate on affectivity structure the discourse (Amossy, Maingueneau). In the Roman novel, these topics model both the persuasive capacity of the narrator and much of the effects of receiving the story. Our analysis seeks to observe and delimit the function of the affective pistis in the characterization of the narrator and the characters, as well as its possible effect on the reader of The Golden Ass of Apuleius.