The development of rhetorical theory in America∗

Expanding upon the Social Value Model of Rushing and Frentz, this essay argues that the fundamental values of the American Western myth exist in the paradoxical form of Individualism vs. Community. Four historical eras are discussed in terms of how the Western film rhetoric of each was patterned in response to threats to the myth. Early Westerns enacted a pattern of “dialectical emphasis” (of Community): classic Westerns, “dialectical reaffirmation “; sixties Westerns, “dialectical emphasis” (of Individualism). It is claimed that reaffirmation of the dialectical tension between the values best strengthens the archetype, and thus America's image of itself. In contrast, the current revival of Western rhetoric, as depicted in the political realm in the elections of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and in the popular culture realm in The Electric Horseman, Urban Cowboy.,and “Dallas,” enacts a pattern of dialectical pseudo‐synthesis, and thus is seriously subversive of the fundamental archetype.     

“By any means necessary”: Re‐reading malcolm X's MECCA conversion

Many scholars have misunderstood and misinterpreted Malcolm X's pilgrimage to Mecca in the spring of 1964. Instead of treating the conversion within its historical moment, scholars have de‐politicized this crucial event by ignoring the historical, political, and rhetorical dynamics of the situation. In this essay, I argue for a rhetorical reading of Malcolm's Mecca pilgrimage. Malcolm's conversion to orthodox Islam facilitated his attempts to actualize his political mission of internationalizing the battle for civil rights. Converting to orthodox Islam also enabled Malcolm to appropriate the rhetoric of the Koran to legitimate his political mission of indicting the United States on human rights violations at the United Nations.     

Speaking Like a State: Listening to Benjamin Franklin in Times of Terror

This essay reconstitutes Benjamin Franklin's characteristic political style as a particular inflection of liberal irony, arguing for a way of speaking today that checks arrogance with humility and attempting to unlock the psychosocial economy of political enjoyment implicit in this rhetoric. To do so, the essay traverses four bodies of discourse (including recent political thinking about civic character, Franklin's oratory in 1787 at the constitutional convention, passages from his letters, and an excerpt from his autobiography) in order to extract strategies for managing situations in which democracy becomes prone to the enjoyments of terror and tyranny.     

The passive style of rhetorical crisis management: A case study of the superfund controversy

While there is a large literature that explains the rhetorical strategies Ronald Reagan used to generate support, there has not been significant analysis of the strategies he used to avoid losing that support in the various crises that threatened his administration. This case study of Reagan's handling of the Superfund controversy reveals that Reagan relied on what Murray Edelman characterizes as the “passive style.” In the passive style, politicians reaffirm personal values, displace blame on subordinates, and use symbolic action to avoid all responsibility. Reagan's successful reliance on the passive style in the Superfund controversy suggests implications for understanding his failure to deal with the Iran‐Contra affair adequately.     

The axiological foundations of Plato's theory of rhetoric

This essay examines Plato's theory of rhetoric to discover the values implicit in that theory. Plato's assumptions about rhetoric and his uses of it initiate a different tradition of thought in Western rhetoric, a tradition which embraces lies, censorship, and deception to inculcate “correct” thought and action in audiences.     

Ronald Reagan's economic jeremiad

Ronald Reagan's address to the nation on February 5, 1981, concerning the state of the economy is a contemporary secular version of the jeremiad, a rhetorical form that has persisted in America since colonial times. Reagan skillfully utilizes the elements of the jeremiad genre to motivate citizen and congressional response to what he views as an economic crisis. He is adept in lamenting ills and faults, vividly depicting potential calamity, exhorting repentance and reform, and declaring optimism.     

Necropolitical voices and bodies in the rhetorical reception of Iranian women's asylum claims

In the mid-1990s, US immigration courts were introduced to a group of Iranian women who claimed that they feared persecution because of their “pro-Western and feminist” political opinions and because of the way they performed gender on their bodies. The claims were, in total, unsuccessful bids to asylum. Analyzing these cases set against the geopolitical background of US–Iranian history and contemporary relations, I argue that their denials illustrate three important dynamics. First, building on rhetorical theorizing of voice and body, this essay demonstrates the uneasy reception in US law and politics of willful noncitizen women of color with explicit political voices and bodies, and second, the consequential racialization of these subjects as willful, unorderable migrant subjects too akin in their sovereignty to their state of birth. Third, this analysis adds to the field's attentiveness to geopolitics by consequently demonstrating US necropolitical desires toward Iran in the state's engagement with these cases. I argue that for the United States to recognize these claimants as having political voices contrary to their state would be to recognize the presence and legitimacy of that state—a sovereign that challenges US power and modernity on the global stage.     

Presidential rhetoric's visual turn: Performance fragments and the politics of illusionism

This essay explores the aesthetic and rhetorical implications of prudent and imprudent presidential performance fragments embodied in photo‐opportunities, thereby addressing presidential rhetoric's “visual turn. “Assembled as a critical rhetoric text, this essay posits that presidential performance fragments privilege the dominant ideology and its power relationships. In addition, this project argues that prudent presidential performances signal a chief executive's consubstantiality with the mythic presidency, centralized authority, and active political leadership. Imprudent photo‐opportunity performances, by contrast, impact negatively a president's image, agenda, credibility, and authority. The essay concludes with a discussion of how political images symbolically affect the citizenry and democratic processes, and advances foundational issues for the critic.     

Neutralizing Protest: The Construction of War,Chaos, and National Identity through US Television News on Abortion-Related Protest, 1991

This paper examines how US TV news on abortion-related protest forecloses possibilities for democracy and political action. Representing abortion-related activism as a battle, news segments portray activists, correspondents, and viewers as villains, witnesses, and victims in a tale of a nation decimated by civil war. While activists describe their work militaristically, the news's war is not the war that activists describe. News discourse represents activists as threatening the American family/community/nation. Applying Hannah Arendt's and Mary Douglas's work shows how the news eclipses public spheres by mapping a pollution narrative onto those who threaten myths of national homogeneity and proper citizenship.     

Legitimizing “Baby Brain”: Tracing a Rhetoric of Significance Through Science and the Mass Media

The discursive construction of “baby brain” functions to legitimize gender stereotypes and deflect attention from a host of material conditions that influence how women experience pregnancy and motherhood. This essay focuses on how the baby brain myth gains public legitimacy by tracing and analyzing its recent emergence in both scientific and mass mediated discourse. I argue that the myth gained legitimacy through a rhetoric of significance—one that conflates statistical significance and functional significance—that operates in both science and media discourse. In the conclusion, I offer an alternative interpretation of baby brain's cause, one that highlights the social structures that make pregnancy and motherhood difficult.     

Sacred Space and secular concern in the photography of Tyagan Miller

This essay examines religious, racial, and historical influences on the creation of a major photo-documentary work. Contemporary Jewish American photographer Tyagan Miller's first project stemmed from his commitment to social justice and education in a secular context. Miller's second major photo essay "Covenant," focuses on the life and work of a church. Although Miller began "Covenant" with an interest in social emancipation, the project moved him to focus on the healing process that takes place in a church environment where he saw an "unbroken family" (interview with Tyagan Miller, July 22, 2002) composed out of the sometimes broken lives of individual congregants. This essay deals with the ethics of Miller's fieldwork for "Covenant," his biographical relationship to his subject matter, and the issue of Jewish representations of Black culture.     

Mobil's epideictic advocacy: “Observations” of Prometheus‐bound

Among “corporate rhetors,” none has been regarded as more creative and aggressive than Mobil Oil. This essay examines Mobil's use of “Observations"—half‐page Sunday newspaper magazine section ads—during the years of 1976–1980. The first focus is upon “Observations” as epideictic discourse developed in response to Mobil's 1975 rhetorical situation. Attention is then turned to examples of the discourse itself and a summary of 149 “Observations.” Following the analysis are treatments of the identificational strategies used by Mobil and the Promethean myth which gives those strategies universal appeal. Finally, Mobil's “epideictic advocacy” is evaluated by the standards of effect, ethics, and art. Through “Observations” Mobil intends to be—like the Sunday newspaper—a part of America's afternoon.     

Research contribution to vowel theory

Though remarkably unsuccessful in unmasking Communist conspirators, Joe McCarthy left a powerful legacy as a great demagogue and witchhunter, a legacy that continues to haunt political discourse today. This essay seeks to explain the power of McCarthy's rhetoric and its apparent resistance to exorcism by historical fact through the literary genre of fantasy. McCarthy, in this view, could not be discredited or argued against because he took no positions. He presented his audience with a sustained moment of hesitation and wonder in which every claim on credulity was offset by a denial of its legitimacy. In the process of creating this fantastic world, a certain ethos was created, an ethos that ultimately overshadowed and conquered its creator.     

Hugh Latimer,spokesman for a Christian commonwealth

Hugh Latimer's activities as a Protestant Reformer and his subsequent martyrdom have historically overshadowed his equally important role as a commentator and critic of the socio‐economic conditions of his age. In this essay, Latimer's role as social commentator and critic is described and evaluated.     

In the company of citizens: the rhetorical contours of Singapore's neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

This essay explores how the language and priorities of the corporate world seep into the halls of government, and the ensuing implications of such rhetoric. Situating my analysis in Singapore's National Day Rally addresses from 1960 to 2018, I uncover two rhetorical signatures unique to Singaporean neoliberalism: the location of national character in economic performance, and the act of packaging and selling the nation to its people. I conclude by examining the implications of a corporate constitution of the nation for evoking affective ties to the nation, and by considering the value of Singapore's case to broader critiques of neoliberalism.     

Blood-Speak: Ward Churchill and the Racialization of American Indian Identity

After publishing a controversial essay on 9/11, Professor Ward Churchill's scholarship and personal identity were subjected to a hostile public investigation. Evidence that Churchill had invented his American Indian identity created vehemence among many professors and tribal leaders who dismissed Churchill because he was not a “real Indian.” This essay examines the discourses of racial authenticity employed to distance Churchill from tribal communities and American Indian scholarship. Responses to Churchill's academic and ethnic self-identification have retrenched a racialized definition of tribal identity defined by a narrow concept of blood. Employing what I term blood-speak, Churchill's opponents harness a biological concept of race that functions as an instrument of exclusion and a barrier to coalitional politics.     

Radio Revisionism: Media Historiography and the KDKA Myth

Popular recountings of radio's past tend to begin with KDKA's November 2, 1920 broadcast of the Coolidge-Harding election returns, in effect deligitimizing the complex pre-commercial period in American broadcasting. The effects of this are apparent in the neglect of the pre-commercial period in popular and scholarly histories of radio. In contributing to the bourgeoning body of revisionist work in radio scholarship, this essay reexamines the historical role of KDKA, Pittsburgh. Primarily, I focus on the maintenance and reinforcement of what I call “the KDKA myth” to examine how KDKA has managed its primacy claim throughout the station's history.     

The Jasper dragging death: Crisis communication and the community newspaper

This essay examines approximately 1 1/2 years of opinion page content in The Jasper NewsBoy concerning the dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in June of 1998. The manner of Byrd's murder horrified much of the nation and galvanized public discussion about race relations. The NewsBoy's coverage was an important part of the community's response to the crisis, which ranged from prayer vigils to town hall meetings. This paper sketches a brief outline of the crisis as it unfolded to provide a context for the papers role, followed by an analysis of the NewsBoy's opinion section based on Fishman's methodology for examining crisis communication events. By combining elements of civic journalism and crisis communication, the newspaper helped the town stage a successful image restoration campaign.