The internal audience in literary and rhetorical discourse

Abstract

The internal audience is an identifiable character or characters addressed within a literary or rhetorical work. The external audience is a reader or listener, real or implied, who is not in the presence of the speaker. There are three important purposes served by the internal audience. First, by providing one of the elements essential to a speech event, the internal audience helps to make the written word imitate the spoken word. Second, when discourse is provided at the request of the internal audience, the utterances of the speaker are made to appear necessary or desirable. Third, by responding to the speaker, the internal audience guides the responses that an author hopes to evoke from the external audience. The type of internal audience differs with the genre. In lyrical and dramatic discourse, the internal audience tends to be distant from the external audience; in narrative and rhetorical discourse, the internal audience is generally close to the external audience. In the age of "secondary orality," the spoken word and the written word are replaced by the electronic word. The external audience can see and hear the responses of the internal audience. The writer or speaker can control the internal audience in order to achieve the desired effect upon the external audience.