Speechwriting is a recognized profession in politics and business, particularly in the English-speaking world where speeches are central to communication. Drawing on archival research into the Kennedy–Sorensen model of State of the Union writing and findings from the author’s survey on contemporary Speechwriting in British and American politics and business: a study of the practice, profession, and speechwriting ethics, this paper highlights how the close collaboration once exemplified by JFK and Ted Sorensen no longer reflects contemporary practice. Today speechwriters often lack access to leaders and policy deliberations, yet their communication expertise and media awareness remain vital to shaping and conveying policy.

Rather than resist slavery directly, the narrative world of Benito Cereno disperses the rejection of tyranny through the intricate construction of subject-object relations, the situational context, Benito Cereno’s stifled, semi-articulated statements, the imagery of the narrative and its complex narrative structure. Through silences, multiple viewpoints, innuendos, refusal to solve certain issues definitely while being explicit about this indeterminacy, Melville’s narrative not only inscribes itself in the Romantic questioning of historiography, but also gestures towards postmodernist inconclusiveness and the writerly text in which the reader is invited to be its co-author who fills out the gaps and silences with their own interpretation.