Researching James Phelan

Phelan also coached the Los Angeles Dons of the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) from 1948 to 1949, the N.Y Yanks and Dallas Texans of the National Football League (NFL) in 1951 and 1952, tallying a professional football coaching record of 13-35-2. In addition, he was the head basketball coach at Saint Mary's for two seasons during World War II (1943–1945), where he amassed a record 10–11. Phelan played college football as a quarterback at the University of Notre Dame from 1915 to 1917. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1973.

The editor of Narrative (the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative), Phelan has written numerous books and articles on narrative theory that together offer a detailed elaboration of what it means to conceive of narrative as rhetoric. He encapsulates that conception in his default definition of narrative as "somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened." Phelan's books include Worlds from Words (1981), Reading People, Reading Plots (1989), Narrative as Rhetoric (1996), Living to Tell about It (2005), Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (2007),"Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010" (2013) and Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017). He has collaborated with David Herman, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol on Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012). In 2020 he collaborated with Matthew Clark on Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative. In this book Clark responds to Phelan's previously published ideas about these aspects, especially in Reading People, Reading Plots, and then Phelan replies to Clark. In 2018, the journal Style devoted a special double issue to his work: Phelan wrote a "target essay" (based on the theoretical argument of Somebody Telling Somebody Else), twenty-five others wrote short responses, and then Phelan replied to those responses. Phelan has also edited or co-edited several collections including the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (2005, co-edited with Peter J. Rabinowitz) and Teaching Narrative Theory (2010, co-edited with David Herman and Brian McHale). With Peter J. Rabinowitz, Phelan co-edited the Ohio State University Press book series, The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative from 1993-2019. He now continues as co-editor with Katra Byram and Faey Halpern. Born in Flushing, NY, Phelan graduated in 1972 with a BA in English from Boston College. At BC he played on the basketball team, earning Academic All-American honors in 1972.

In 1991 he wrote a memoir called Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor. Along with Frederick Aldama, Brian McHale, and David Herman, he founded Project Narrative, an initiative at Ohio State University.