摘要：Competence' 1 is the necessary (na.ve) target for all discursive practices, because it points to the social consensus, exploited by classic pragmatism too, that empiric truth and textual trust are the result of evidence and context. Cultural rhetoric, and implicitly 'competence' in achieving and decoding such practices, is necessary for social unity. Cultural skill is implemented by means of tradition and education, to be further advanced as knowledge acquisition in political and professional environments. 'Competence' is a social fact, culturally learned through imitative action, formal education or coercion. "A political aesthetics structures and mediates the individual's relationship (and the group's) to the popular and the everyday lifeworld" (Denzin 1992: 134).The narrative literature conveys such an awareness and helps readers find common social ground for conflicting claims of whatever nature (cultural, ethnical, etc.), without any commitment to other ideology than that of the literary 'competence,' which makes political use of the cultural 'competence'. The latter formalizes the rules of social interaction through collective narrative and rhetorical procedure, acting, in popular terms, as foundation of public normativity and assessment. What I argue for is that the functional requirements of fictional output derive the narrative proficiency, characteristic of a reader who needs to come to terms with (in)competent writing. For instance, the dissociation between perception of ideology and ideology at work in narratives is the showmanship most twentieth century narratives have already appropriated. Consequently, the narrative understanding of ideology ends up as actual rhetorical practice in the contemporary novel genre. Rhetoric patterns and subjective meanings are shaped by ideological representations of functional plot requirements that are organized in a system which reminds of 'competence' (in the sense of procedure by which agents know, represent and use
关键词：contemporary novel; cultural competence; pragmatism
