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Narratives in Rhetorical Discourse Rhetoric can be defined as "the use of symbols to induce social action" (Hauser 2002: 3), thus making rhetorical discourse texts aimed at specific audiences for specific reasons in specific situations. While they are rarely complete narratives or completely narrative, such discourses often use narrative elements as means to their argumentative, convincing or otherwise motivational ends. The study of narratives in rhetorical discourse takes as its object discourses that primarily serve argumentative functions in contrast to aesthetic or didactic functions. It overlaps with subfields of narrative study, most importantly rhetorical narratology, research on storytelling (Norlyk, Wolff Lundholt & Hansen → Corporate Storytelling [1]) and Narrative Inquiry (Bamberg → Identity and Narration [2]). In contrast to more formal approaches to narrative such as classical narratology (Meister → Narratology [3]), these approaches share an interest in the ways in which narratives move or influence readers and audiences. They all understand narrative as situated in a communicative framework. Being a form of rhetorical criticism, the study of narratives in rhetorical discourse offers analytical and evaluative readings of narratives and narrative elements in situated discourse or acts aimed at persuading, convincing, uniting or otherwise moving people towards specific ends. It differs from narrative inquiry (as practiced in psychology, ethnography, socio-linguistics and the social sciences) in that the primary object of narrative inquiry is personal/group identity or linguistic competence. It also differs from rhetorical narratology as practiced in literary criticism in that the latter conceives "of narrative as an art of communication" (Phelan 2005a), while the study of narratives in rhetorical discourse works primarily with narratives in rhetorical communication. Thirdly, in methodology as well as in expected output, it differs from theories of storytelling (e.g., corporate communication, branding), when storytelling is understood as the strategic use of narratives: where the study of storytelling draws heavily on quantitative methods in

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