Rhetoric is not only an art of writing. In principle as in its history, it doubles as an art of reading (an art of analysis) that looks at discursive syntax from the point of view of its arrangement and experiments, the syntagmatic deployment of an utterance, with the possible forms of its composition. It is for this reason that rhetoric has been able to reflect on narrative morphology by apprehending the form of narrative from the readerly point of view as a formal process of sequential construction. The “moment” 1910 – 1920 is precisely the time when such attention to the morphology of the novel develops in Germany through the efforts of Schissel and Dibelius. A number of Russian formalists during the 1920s were to refer to this development explicitly. It is the story of that meeting between the rhetoric of composition and the poetics of the novel that we wish to look at here.