Performing Novelty: Belletristic Rhetoric and the 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' in Modern Cinema

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Abstract

While the persuasive force of novelty is often embodied by the performance of the Sophists, I argue that the concept remains under-theorized. Scottish belletrists devote explicit attention to novelty and, as such, their work provides an ideal trajectory for conceptualizing novelty in terms accessible to contemporary scholarship. I provide the example of the “manic pixie dream girl,” who embodies an extreme case of the persuasive force the belletrists identified with novel forms of argument

Author

• William Saas, University of Nevada, Las Vegas