Clinton and Vietnam: A case for amnestic rhetoric

Bill Clinton's 1993 Memorial Day speech at the Vietnam Wall is an example of amnestic rhetoric, which seeks to discourage public debate and to diminish public memory. In this essay I argue that Clinton's epideictic discourse camouflages an act of apologia in which he defends his controversial opposition to the Vietnam War. Second, I argue that Clinton simultaneously directs his audience's attention away from the past and toward the future, urging them to remember the buried, but to bury the memory of Vietnam. Third, I argue that the speech culminates with an act of rhetorical investiture for Clinton as commander in chief. Finally, I propose the concept of amnestic rhetoric as an addition to public memory scholarship.     

Modern poetry and a Kat called Krazy

This essay uses the nature of the genre of apologia as outlined by speech communication scholars as a framework to examine Richard Nixon's apology to the nation on the occasion of his resignation. Mr. Nixon conformed well to the requirements of the subgenre, explanation, but erred in areas not suggested in contemporary writings on apologia. The gravity of Nixon's misdeeds and the incongruity of his admission of guilt overshadowed the strategy of explanation which he employed to defend himself.     

Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association

This essay argues that Audre Lorde's 1981 keynote speech, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” has much to contribute to communication scholars’ understanding of human biases and rhetorical artistry. The significance of Lorde's subject is one reason for devoting critical attention to her speech, because, in contemporary public life in the United States, anger has abiding relevance in an extraordinary range of rhetoric and public address. Another reason for contemplating Lorde's speech is the fact that anger was a major theme throughout the internationally acclaimed poet-activist's advocacy. The essay suggests that Lorde's speech illustrates a communication technique, shifting subjectivities, which recurs in her rhetorical artistry.     

Student Free Speech and Schools as Public Spaces

Free speech jurisprudence is caught between crediting the First Amendment rights of students when they resemble adults or restricting such rights when students seemingly act as children. In Morse v. Frederick (2007), the Supreme Court ruled against Joseph Frederick and his “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner because Frederick's speech seemed valueless as an adult act, as it lacked any discernible political value. In this essay, Neil Dhingra uses Hannah Arendt's thought to argue that schools should not be interpreted as political spaces but as social spaces where educational authorities should exercise forbearance as students such as Frederick learn to exercise their free speech rights. In particular, students will practice their First Amendment rights by exposing and exploring the discrepancy between appearance and reality, through dark forms of humor, and in forming different types of friendship, all of which schools are unlikely to be able to manage or interpret. Recognizing these unruly and quasi‐humorous forms of First Amendment practice helps make sense of Frederick's banner. Dhingra argues that in order to create space for students to develop freely — that is, without being subject to excessive scrutiny or succumbing to the danger of conformity, or both — schools should show a wide but not unlimited tolerance to speech like that of Frederick, which may otherwise be dismissed as childish and valueless “gibberish.”     

Relevance Revisited: Some Reflections on an Australian Senate Standing Committee Report on Higher Education

This essay was' prompted by a report prepared by the Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training of the Australian Senate. After briefly examining questions posed by the Report's reception, I will take one type of response to the Committee's curriculum concerns, a response alluded to in the Report but not canvassed in any detail, and make some comments on an attempt to use that approach. I will then briefly examine the comments on teaching in the Report with a particular interest in the relation between their comments on teaching and their comments on curriculum.     

Women's issues,women's place: Gender‐related problems in presidential campaigns

This essay is a feminist rhetorical analysis of recurring gender‐related problems in presidential campaigns, focusing particularly on the 1992 campaign. I examine 39 speeches from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions (1972–1992) for discussion of women's issues, women's roles, and men's roles, and conclude that the anti‐feminist “backlash”; of the 1980s has taken a serious toll on public attention to women's issues. When politicians spoke of women's concerns, they largely ignored actual issues, and instead focused their attention on women's roles in society. Men's roles were also a central focus, as each presidential candidate sought to convince the voting public to cast him as the Leading Man.     

The Case of M and D in Context: Iris Murdoch,Stanley Cavell and Moral Teaching and Learning

Iris Murdoch's famous case of M and D illustrates the moral importance of learning to see others in a more favourable light through renewed attention. Yet if we do not read this case in the wider context of Murdoch's work, we are liable to overlook the attitudes and transformations involved in coming to change one's mind as M does. Stanley Cavell offers one such reading and denies that the case represents a change in M's sense of herself or the possibilities for her world of the kind exemplified by Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House. In this essay, I challenge Cavell's reading, suggesting that the case, while it may not be an exemplar of the perfectionist outlook as described by Cavell, can and should be interpreted in perfectionist terms. To see this, I reflect on Murdoch's views on the endless perfectibility of language, the importance of humility, and the role of love and attention in moral learning. I conclude that Murdoch's work uniquely sheds light on how we might cultivate a perfectionist outlook in ourselves and others, and describes the distinctive role that some novels can play in moral education.     

The role of private speech in the transition from collaborative to independent task performance in young children

This study was designed to examine the following central Vygotskian hypotheses about the functions of preschool children's private speech: (1) that private speech facilitates the transition from collaborative to independent task performance, and (2) that children's use of private speech is conducive to task success. Age-related changes in children's use of private speech were also examined. Forty preschoolers, ranging in age from three to five, completed a selective attention task with scaffolded assistance given from an experimenter when needed. In an effort to overcome several methodological limitations found in previous research, a new microgenetic method of analyzing speech-performance relations based on assigning task items to discrete categories reflecting six possible co-occurrences between private speech (item-relevant speech, item-irrelevant speech, silence) and performance (success, failure) was introduced. Results were that (1) item-relevant speech was used more often during successful than during failed items while the opposite was true for item-irrelevant speech; (2) children were more likely to use private speech on successful items after scaffolding than they were on similar items not following scaffolding; (3) after scaffolding, children were more likely to succeed on the next item if they talked to themselves than if they were silent; and (4) hypothesized curvilinear, age-related patterns in children's item-relevant private speech and silence were found, however, only when analyzing speech during successful items. Implications of this research for preschool teachers and parents are discussed.     

Review Essay: Assessing Rhetorics of Social Resistance

This essay draws from Edwin Black's Rhetorical Questions to illuminate the role of mutability in rhetoric, consciousness, and social idioms as it is displayed in Haydar ‘Abd al‐Shafi's speech delivered at the Madrid conference on October 31, 1991. Shaft's speech represents a significant mutation in Palestinian discourse. In this speech, the symbolic mold and the hereditarian social idioms that had controlled the Palestinian narrative until the intifada yielded to a mixed idiom that retained the hereditarian values essential for Palestinian identity but opened up space for the convictional values necessary for negotiation and rapprochement with Israel. This essay demonstrates that rhetorical critical theory could benefit from a close reading and application of the themes in Rhetorical Questions.     

From the Parlor to the Barnyard: Obama and Holder on Race

This essay explores Barack Obama's “A More Perfect Union” speech and Eric Holder's speech marking African American History Month as a case study of contemporary public discourse on race. This article argues that in these speeches, Obama and Holder perform the social drama of race relations in profoundly different ways. Drawing on the Burkean parlor and barnyard as metaphors of rhetorical form, the analysis demonstrates the interplay of these dialogic and agonistic forms in motivating democratic deliberation on race. Implications of these rhetorical forms for healthy democratic practice are discussed.     

From Environmental Education to Ecopolitics. Affirming Changing Agendas for Teachers1

In this paper I examine Peirce's epistemological and ontological theories and indicate their relevance to educational practice. I argue that Peirces conception of Firsts, Seconds and Thirds entails a fundamental ontological realism. I further argue that Peirce does have a theory of truth, that it is a particular non‐traditional ‘correspondence’ theory, consistent with, and implicit in, an over‐arching position of pragmatic realism. Peirce's epistemological position is subject to misinterpretation when the ontological realism on which it rests is overlooked. Finally I suggest that such a re‐consideration of Peirce's pragmatic ontology and epistemology in an educational context is needed.     

“A Creative Psalm of Brotherhood”: The (De)constructive Play in Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

Scholars have celebrated the spoken word in King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” but they have overlooked the significance of the Letter's writing. In this essay I closely read King's act of writing the Letter, along with the figures of speech he employs in it, and I show how both—by enacting the mass media's ability to cross contexts—are essential to King's political strategy of nonviolent direct action, as well as to the Letter's argument against segregation—an argument that, before the fact, follows the steps we have since come to associate with deconstructive analysis.     

系统功能语法中的转述句分析

关于转述句，传统语法从句法形式出发认为当转述小句出现中句首时，直／间接引语是转述句的宾语或补语，它与转述小句之间是从属关系，当转述小句不出现在句首时，它被视为评述分句，直／间接引语被认为是主句，章根据系统功能语法的有关理论，把直／间接引语与转述小句之间的关系看作是语义投射关系，在转述小句出现在句首的转述句中，间接引语与转述小句之间是主从的依存关系，在转述小句不出现在句首的转述句中，直／间接引语与转述小句之间是并列关系，同时也指出Halliday和Thompsom关于投射理论中存在的不足。     

Race,culture, and pluralism: The evolution of Dewey’s vision for a democratic curriculum

This is the second of four essays discussing John Dewey's short essay, ‘Education as engineering’. Dewey's views are remarkably timely against the background of recent discussions about the role of evidence in educational practice and a call for research that tells us ‘what works’. Dewey's view is nuanced and helps one to see what one should and should not expect from an engineering approach to education. However, Dewey pays little attention to the role of normative judgement in engineering and does not address the question of whether engineering in education might be fundamentally different from engineering in other domains. This paper provides some suggestions for how one may want to articulate this difference and argues that it is important to bear in mind that there are differences between the building of bridges and the ‘building’ of human beings.     

Opportunities and limitations for learning within teachers’ collaboration in teams: perspectives from action learning

Researchers posit that teachers' teaching and learning are improved by teachers' collective efforts to examine and reflect on practice. Yet the questions of what and how teachers learn when collaborating with colleagues remain unanswered: What kinds of knowledge and skills do teachers acquire in conjunction with their collaboration? What brings about teachers' learning when they collaborate in teams? And how does their learning affect their practice? In this paper I will examine to what extent action learning can contribute to answering these questions from a Danish perspective.

I begin the paper by presenting action learning, which formed the framework for the teacher team collaboration that provides the empirical fundament of this paper, and by discussing my roles as consultant and researcher. Thereafter, first the possibilities, then the limitations of teachers' collaboration in teams for learning are discussed. Finally, several methodological dilemmas are considered and the paper's conclusions are presented.     

Developing strategic readers: a multimodal analysis of a primary school teacher's use of speech,gesture and artefacts

Research on implementing reading strategy instruction has primarily focused on teachers' verbal communication with limited attention to other semiotic resources such as gesture and artefacts. In this paper, we construct a ‘telling case’ on the basis of how one primary teacher from the United States used speech, gesture and artefacts as a means of communication while instructing her students in reasons to predict when reading. Data sources for this case study consisted of field notes, artefacts and digital video. We analysed the teacher's use of gesture, speech and artefacts from a social semiotic multimodal perspective. Findings indicate that the teacher created meaning by interweaving multiple modes in the communicative contexts of strategy instruction using speech, deictic gestures, metaphoric gestures and artefacts. These findings are important to reading strategy instruction because much of the research and discussion of practice to date has centred on the instruction of reading strategies using teacher and student speech and not attending to the use of semiotic resources beyond speech.     

From science,moral‐poetics: Dr. James Dobson's response to the fetal tissue research initiative

This essay analyzes a letter written by James Dobson to over 2 million constituents of Focus on the Family. The letter discusses the 1993 Fetal Tissue Research Initiative, and is a complex example of moral‐poetic discourse rising above the scientific ideal in American culture. I first employ a judgmental analysis to determine what Dobson's potential reading audience was being asked to believe. Second, using Kenneth Burke's distinction between semantic and poetic meaning I examine Dobson's discourse as a moral‐poetic response to the amoral stance of scientific discourse. Finally, I analyze the motive underpinning Dobson's discourse to understand the actions of Dobson's envisioned moral agent. This study found that Dobson provided a way out of the moral quagmire science has placed humans in by highlighting mankind's ability to morally act, thereby initiating an individual‐moral redemptive cycle.     

Stammering is outgrown

This essay demonstrates that a speech of accusation motivates a response in a speech of defense and that both should be treated as a rhetorical speech set. The author uses Fisher's motives of affirmation and purification, Bitzer's conception of the rhetorical situation, and the Classical schema of stasis to explicate the speech set. He offers Pope Leo X vs. Martin Luther as an illustrative example.     

The duality of scientific ethos: Deep and surface structures

Aristotle's concept of ethos is primarily one based on civic duty, and as such loses its specificity when extended to the scientific forum. By adapting Aristotle's traditional concept of ethos to contemporary social norms of science, a link can be established between classical theory and contemporary practice. In this essay, I use Robert Merton's theory of the normative conditions of science to perform a meta‐critique of the use of ethos in four case studies. This meta‐analysis reveals the dual structure of ethos as reflected in a surface structure of style and a deep structure of argument.