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In paranormal reality television, the medial evidence of senses adding to the visual and auditory may produce the most compelling intermedial experience. When little can be seen or heard, the lasting impact of a ghost hunting show may rely on what it makes the audience feel through the sense of touch. Even if the touch perceptions were imaginedor precisely because they were imaginedthe experience can be all the more powerful. Intermediality research supplies the rhetorical devices of ekphrasis and hypotyposis as tools for a study of the television show Ghost Adventures. A definition of senses as media is advanced in conjunction with a three-tier model of mediality to lay open the intermedial experience involved in imagined touch perceptions as medium-specific instances of rhetorical figuration.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a much-investigated tale of murder and disturbing report. In this article, I aim to show how sounds enforce meaning in the story, and how two rhetorical devices—ekphrasis and hypotyposis—can be used to highlight the different ways the story can be interpreted. Following the strategy lately championed by Brett Zimmerman, the work outlines a procedure by which reader effects can be qualitatively analyzed instead of speculating on “what really happened” in the story and what Poe might have meant with it. Even though ekphrasis and hypotyposis have been mostly used in the study of visual images, there is no reason why they could not be productively applied in the study of sounds in literature. As my analysis of the story will make clear, the visual images mentally produced in one's reading of a literary text are often inextricably meshed with sounds—in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the creaking hinges of a lantern, the scurrying of nocturnal insects, the military beat of the exigent heart, to name just a few. In fact, the auditory quality of these images is best illuminated by the rhetorical strategies this article sets forth to expand the ways of reading Poe's narratives.

The article discusses basic questions of narrative studies and definitions of narrative from a historical and conceptual perspective in order to map the terrain between different narratologies. The focus is placed on the question of how fiction interacts with other realms of our lives or, more specifically, how reading fiction both involves and affects our everyday meaning making operations. British horror writer Ramsey Campbell’s (b. 1946) short story “The Scar” (1967) will be used as a test case to show how both narrative modes of representation and the reader’s narrative sense making operations may travel between art and the everyday, from fiction to life and back. We argue that the cognitively inspired narrative studies need to pair up with linguistically oriented narratology to gain the necessary semiotic sensitivity to the forms and modes of narrative sense making. Narratology, in turn, needs to explore in detail what it is in the narrative form that enables it to function as a tool for reaching out and making sense of the unfamiliar. In our view, reading fictional narratives such as “The Scar” can help in learning and adopting linguistic resources and story patterns from fiction to our everyday sense making efforts.

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