An other‐burkean frame: Rhetorical criticism and the call of the other

This essay extends the work of Murray (1998), which used the philosophy of ethics of Emmanuel Levinas to critique the rhetorical theory and critical methods of Kenneth Burke. This essay evaluates that critique by analyzing Nazi propaganda and Senator Edward Kennedy's “Chappiquiddick” speech through the critical lens of a revised Burkean frame. These analyses demonstrate that an Other‐Burkean frame can supplement existing resources for rhetorical criticism and contribute to a richer understanding of human communication.     

No Jack Kennedy: Mitt Romney's “Faith in America” Speech and the Changing Religious-Political Environment

In December of 2007, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney traveled to Texas to give an address on religion and politics. The speech was heralded by many as Romney's “JFK moment.” This study explores the campaign religion speeches of Kennedy and Romney by considering various issues concerning context, audience, and content of the two speeches. Guiding this analysis is Roderick Hart's work on the civil-religious contract and Kenneth Burke's work on dramatistic analysis, which are utilized to demonstrate that—despite the media's proclamations—Romney's speech represented a stark shift from Kennedy's rhetorical approach. Implications are drawn concerning the differences between the two speeches and an understanding of the confessional political style guiding the intersection of religion and politics today.     

Rhetorical theory as message reception: A cognitive response approach to rhetorical theory and criticism

Traditional rhetorical theory tends to adopt the rhetor's point of view, emphasizing invention of rhetorical messages, rather than the audience's reception and interpretation of messages. The audience is ordinarily conceptualized in humanistic rhetorical theory as a target, a source of expectations to guide the rhetor's invention, a means to accomplish the rhetor's ends, or even an obstacle. We argue that a more complete view of rhetoric should include the audience as a potentially active part of the process of persuasion. Accordingly, we propose to supplement our traditional theories of rhetoric by sketching a complementary view of rhetoric as the process of an auditor's processing and responding to messages. The inspiration for this conception, Petty and Cacioppo's Elaboration Likelihood Model, is sketched, and implications for rhetorical theory and criticism are discussed.     

Enactment as rhetorical strategy in the year of living dangerously

In The Year of Living Dangerously, the philosophical position that is argued in the film's content is reflected also in the film's form; i.e., the film is an enactment of the argument it makes. Failure to recognize enactment as a viable rhetorical strategy may have led to a failure to recognize the film's rhetorical force. Further study of enactment and its rhetorical effectiveness are suggested.     

Jimmy Carter and the rhetoric of charisma

Jimmy Carter's unusual success in the Presidential Primaries of 1976 has been the subject of much discussion. One rhetorical explanation posits that Carter's message may be described in terms of Weber's concept of charisma, and Bormann's theory of rhetorical vision. The charismatic message was caught up in a unique rhetorical situation, the social fantasies attending the Bicentennial Celebration. Carter's rhetoric and the people's fantasies transcended along similar lines. This confluence helped to carry Carter to the White House.     

The Shadow Knows: The Counter-Fantasy of the American Antihero and Symbolic Divergence in Golden Age Radio

Various radio and pulp incarnations of The Shadow have played a pivotal role in shaping American superhero mythology and cultural unconscious. This essay explores The Shadow's origins within the 1930s, and then utilizes Fantasy Theme Analysis to uncover mythic tensions and conflicts within The Shadow's transition from noir-like dystopian antihero into the more romantic utopian superhero of Orson Welles' 1937 radio program. We conclude by contemplating rhetorical implications for The Shadow's “symbolic divergence,” a fantasy evolving into contradictory counter-fantasies and rhetorical visions in radio and pulps, as a provocative illustration of theoretical debates regarding the psychodynamic functions of rhetorical fantasy.     

The Good Will Hunting Technique

“The Good Will Hunting Technique” analyzes and enacts rhetorical paradigms present in popular culture. The main objects of examination are Gus van Sant's film, Good Will Hunting, and Eminem's music video “Mosh.” The author extracts positive aspects of popular culture to feature a rational-affective approach to rhetoric. The notion of mind–body rhetorical collaboration, which stems from Behavioral Doctrine developed during Germany's Weimar era, combines an emphasis on exteriority with traditional notions of rhetoric to establish a method for progressive action in lived reality.     

Symbolic convergence and special communication theories: Sensing and examining dis/enchantment with the theoretical robustness of critical auto ethnography

This study answers 4 research questions as it explicates the SCT's ability to explain how special communication theories come into being as the product of rhetorical visions that contain the norms, conventions, and customs for exemplar participation in a specific communication style. This study demonstrates that the concept of rhetorical vision yields insights into the creation, rise, and potential for demise of a style‐specific, special theory of communication named the critical autoethnography special theory (CAST). The study reports that the CAST itself is a symbolically created product of the critical autoethnographic rhetorical vision (CARV). The study's findings indicate that CARV's life‐cycle is congruent with those of other rhetorical visions and would predict that the CARV may well implode upon itself as it contains the seeds of its own destruction.     

John Morley and the Irish question: Chart‐prayer‐dream

Attempts to circumscribe “the Burkean method” of rhetorical criticism can be frustrating. Critics more profitably might use Burke as an example and a prod, appropriating—as was done in this study—whichever of Burke's concepts, methods, and metaphors seem applicable to a given rhetorical event. Burke's “chart‐prayer‐dream” trilogy, together with his understanding of “strategies,” was employed to examine Morley's “Home Rule” speech before the Oxford Union in 1888. Morley's reply to Randolph Churchill abandoned propositional argument in favor of reviv‐alistic‐exhortation early in the speech; his strategies of form, argument, labelling, style, and mimesis are best understood as those of the High Priest seeking a confessional and an act of expiation from his auditors.     

Research reports

Rowland offers a helpful synthesis of the defining characteristics of myth in rhetorical discourse. But his insistence on too rigid an approach to mythic criticism risks diminishing the importance of the critical method and impoverishing the perception of rhetorical artifacts. Root metaphors in Rowland's thinking distort the nature of rhetoric and the work of the critic.     

Cocoon Minorities: Understanding Rush Limbaugh's Co-option of the Rhetorical Strategies of the Disenfranchised Position Through Homological Analysis

Conceptualizing minority social and political groups calls for careful consideration of power, prestige, and numerical systems. However, when members of empowered groups self-identify as disenfranchised, they create unique rhetorical situations. Through homological analysis of the rhetorical tactics of Rush Limbaugh matched with an analysis of Sandra Fluke's rhetorical strategies, we assert that subtle co-option of communication tactics poses larger questions about self-identification of individuals as minority members within social and political systems.     

The Gender of Water and the Pleasure of Alienation: A Critical Analysis of Visiting Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam, located on the Arizona-Nevada border and damming the Colorado River, is a well-known and often-visited place. The meanings people assign to such a structure articulate key environmental, economic and technological ideologies. An exploration of those meanings is important for understanding the forces that shape public perception and environmental policy. Specifically, this essay examines the official rhetoric of Hoover Dam from an ecofeminist perspective. Through a critical reading of the educational displays, films, plaques and other texts as well as the physical structure of the dam itself, three rhetorical strategies used in the dam's official presentation are identified. First, the Bureau of Reclamation presents the Colorado River as a chaotic, feminine entity in need of masculine control. Second, the river's rhetorical status as an Other encourages audiences to identify with the subject position of nature's master and thereby participate in the pleasures such an identity offers. Third, the Bureau uses the prevalent “common sense” of Native Americans as environmentally sensitive in combination with an “historical” Native American voice to establish the dam as both environmentally sound and a logical step in humanity's progress toward economic development and dominion over nature.     

The civile conversation: Communication in the renaissance

Stephano Guazzo's The Civile Conversation was a dominant contribution to the literature of manners in the Renaissance. The work, however, was far more than a Courtesybook. Guazzo's treatise helps explain the rhetorical influence in Renaissance thought and the relationship of that influence to humanism. A study of the rhetorical inheritance shows that Guazzo owed a substantial debt to classical theory and pedagogy, but it reveals also an extension of communication study to all aspects of life. A consideration of the humanistic impulse indicates that this extension emerges from a conception of man as communicator, a conception that expands upon some traditional notions concerning rhetoric and humanism in the Renaissance.     

“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.     

A fantasy theme analysis of political cartoons on the Clinton-Lewinsky-Starr affair

–We used Symbolic Convergence Theory to analyze 2,000 political cartoons on the investigation, impeachment, and trial of the president. The cartoonists' vision incorporates components from Starr's and Clinton's visions: “Our public figures (Clinton, Starr, Congress, the news media) are engaged in a tawdry burlesque drama.” The number of levels in a rhetorical vision depends on the vision's complexity. We show that multiple, independent, rhetors can create a rhetorical vision. These messages, highly visual and generally critical, freely use metaphor and allusions, allowing multiple interpretations and rendering the fantasy themes in these dramas accessible to readers with widely divergent attitudes. Despite their fictionality, these messages concern important issues and make moral judgments on these public figures.     

Communication's quest for whiteness: the racial politics of disciplinary legitimacy

ABSTRACT

This essay examines communication's historical anxieties regarding disciplinary legitimacy as an investment in whiteness. We argue that such anxieties are predicated upon a normative ideal of citizenship. As such, rhetorics of disciplinary legitimacy enact white civil society's originary exclusion, which is antiblackness. To illuminate the ways antiblackness finds expression in these anxieties, we engage the field's lengthy archive of public musings regarding legitimacy to trace the rhetorical workings of antiblackness therein.     

Print Media/Journalism

Charles A. Goodrum's The Library of Congress (New York: Praeger, 1974—$10.00)

Richard E. Huss' The Development of Printer's Mechanical Typesetting Methods: 1822-1925 (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1973—price not known)

Bruce M. Kennedy's Community Journalism: A Way of Life (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1974—price not known)

Louis E. Ingelhart's The College and University Campus Student Press: An Examination of its Status and Aspirations and Some of the Myths Surrounding It (send to Dr. John A. Boyd, National Council of College Publications Advisors, TMU 300, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana 47809—$2.00, paper)

Dan D. Nimmo and Charles M. Bonjean's Political Attitudes and Public Opinion (New York: McKay, 1972—$6.95, paper)     

Anita Bryant's stand against “militant homosexuality”: Religious fundamentalism and the democratic process

This study examines the theoretical bases for Anita Bryant's recent opposition to activism by the Gay Liberation Alliance. Treating Bryant's Save Our Children organization (now called Protect America's Children) as a counter‐movement to the GLA, the study comprises an analysis and evaluation of the rhetorical arguments and strategies employed by the Bryant forces. The author contends (1) that Bryant's strategy of linking child exploitation to homosexuality belies her fundamentalist reasoning and (2) that her presumption of the inherent moral supremacy of fundamentalist doctrine contradicts the First Amendment.     

Progressive form and Mexican culpability in Polk's justification for war

The rhetorical structure of James K. Polk's justification for war with Mexico is analyzed from the perspective of Kenneth Burke's theory of form. Particular attention is given to the president's technique of suggesting Mexican culpability through a progression of forms which contrasts American rationality with Mexican irrationality.     

Hegemony and globalism: Kenneth Burke and paradoxes of representation

Kenneth Burke's concern for the processes of identification underlying rhetorical action can play an important role in mediating tensions between globalism and community interests. Looking to imagination's potential for bridging gaps between individuals and groups offers to combine certain of Burke's key insights with recent theoretical work on hegemony. Bringing Burke into conversation with articulation theory provides conceptual tools for holding social orders open for rearticulation, and for rearticulating the democratic imaginary. This conversation stresses the need to translate universal concerns into particular contexts, which remains a contentious process requiring imagination.