In this essay, we examine the complete published speeches of Arne Duncan from his seven years (2009–2015) as Barack Obama’s secretary of education, to understand how his language both defined problems and promoted solutions for our nation’s schools. By looking at Duncan’s rhetoric through close readings and computer-aided textual analyses, we find that his discourse contained paradoxes, particularly through a notion of schooling as a means of achieving both social justice and economic growth, by framing education as both a private and public good, and through assertions about the need for government both to centralize authority over schooling and promote a global educational marketplace. In essence, Duncan used a both/and approach to these purposes, adding to our understandings of the character and functions of educational rhetoric and showing how critical it is for scholars to recognize that such tensions exist in language about what education policy should do. Ultimately, we conclude that Duncan’s rhetoric obscures historic tensions in the purpose of education and highlights the way that policy rhetoric may saddle public education with responsibilities beyond its capacities.

Abstract Opioid addiction and overdose are widely recognized as a contemporary “crisis” across the United States. To address rapidly increasing mortality rates related to this substance use epidemic, the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office announced in January 2018 that it would encourage the development of supervised injection sites or “Comprehensive User Engagement Sites” within city limits. Official communications cited select moments from the region’s past to frame these sites as urgent while constituting a supportive, unified public. Through remediating disidentification, a mode of rhetorical contestation and reformulation, local community members used an alternate historical framing to resist dominant ideology and revise the terms of the related public discourse. By further developing the concept of rhetorical disidentification, this essay demonstrates how the deployment of historical analogy in response to proposed public health interventions can enable the public recognition and potential address of systemic racial inequities.

AbstractIn this essay, I offer a reception study of the varied responses to and interpretations of a burning church in the town of Eldoret following the 2007 Kenya presidential election. Specifically, I study responses from the U.S. and British media, U.S. officials, and Kenyan politicians. My analysis illuminates how different uses of the term “genocide” mobilize particular sensibilities about the relation between ethnicity and politics and demonstrates how the label of genocide constrains interpretations of violence. In the media and discourse of U.S. politicians, the identification or denial of genocide was made by setting ethnicity and politics as opposing explanatory factors of the violence. Discourses in Kenya, however, demonstrate that understanding the violence required understanding the intersection and permeability of these same categories. This analysis has important implications for understanding how conflicts are and are not named genocide. It demonstrates the importance of attending to the nuanced rhetoric of genocide and calls our attention to the contingent relationships among ethnicity, politics, and genocide.

Abstract In this article, I argue for the importance of investigating covenantal rhetoric as a multipronged rhetorical device that can be used by political leaders to moralize discourse and strategically manage competing covenantal tensions in response to a particular social, economic, and/or political exigence. Specifically, it explores how President Ronald Reagan drew on the Puritan covenantal framework to usher in an era of free-market economics and transform it from a chaotic and self-interested system into a covenantal economy in which people could fulfill their moral obligations to self, God, and others. Using covenantal form, Reagan eased the tensions between freedom and order, grace and works, and individuality and community in a way that provided a moral foundation for his tax and welfare policies and a moral safety net for all who had faith in God’s grace. Within Reagan’s covenantal economy, trickle-down economics was framed as both an economically feasible and morally commendable process in which entrepreneurs and welfare recipients could join together in a “circle of prosperity” without government interference or the obligation to provide direct material assistance to others.

AbstractIn this essay, we analyze the public communication debacle before the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake that led to the infamous trial of the “L’Aquila Seven.” Examining the trial transcripts to extract norms regarding the proper role of scientists in society, we conclude that the first verdict interpellated the figure of the responsible scientist citizen who is expected to perform rhetorical citizenship when communicating with a lay public, while the second assumed a distinction between public and technical spheres that absolves scientists from responsibility to their fellow citizens and reduces their role to performance of an expertise divorced from rhetoric. Tracing the civic outcomes of these conflicting norms, we identify three missed opportunities during the prequake discourse in which the scientists failed to correct statements that they, and only they, knew to be flawed. To prevent future communicative debacles that arise from a dangerous separation of scientists and laypeople, we argue that scientists need to come to see themselves as scientist citizens, experts who take on the civic responsibility of clearly communicating their knowledge to their fellow citizens when such sharing is necessary to the public good.

AbstractIn the rhetoric of contemporary federal education reform, public school teachers are often blamed for and championed as solutions to educational problems. Representations of teachers as heroic and blameworthy are an integral component of a neoliberal rationality apparent in education reform since the publication of the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk, as they allow political actors to promote individual solutions to systemic issues that affect student achievement. After briefly exploring the rhetoric of reform, this essay focuses on the ways teachers negotiate the discourses that implicate their profession. To do so, I analyze a corpus of 18 open letters written and published online by current and former public school teachers in protest of policy and/or specific political actors. I argue that authors of these open letters leverage their professional identities to protest and articulate alternatives to seemingly pervasive neoliberal logics inherent in contemporary education reform. In turn, I maintain that analyzing vernacular exchanges, such as teachers’ protest discourse, is imperative to understanding the material consequences of education policy as well as the full discursive space of policymaking.

Abstract This essay examines the transvaginal ultrasound (TVU) debate that was ignited in the spring of 2012 by a Virginia law mandating the procedure as a prerequisite for first-trimester abortions. This debate represents a recent intensification of historical arguments grounded in how the abortion debate intersects with medical practice. By following the debate as it unfolded on pro-choice and pro-life blogs, this analysis uncovers three overarching topoi in the discourse mirrored on both sides: the medical necessity (or lack thereof) of the procedure; the importance of informed consent; and comparisons to rape. Using Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze, this essay argues that across all three topoi, both pro-choice and pro-life activists’ rhetoric relied heavily upon implicit assumptions of the superiority and necessity of medical science. The TVU debate demonstrates an argumentation strategy that both strips the issue of its political, legal, moral, and personal contexts and rhetorically positions pro-choice groups disadvantageously by obfuscating any discussion of women’s rights.

Book Review| December 01 2018 Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse. Edited By Richard D. Besel and Bernard K. Duffy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016; pp. ix + 370. $95.00 cloth. Jessica M. Prody Jessica M. Prody St. Lawrence University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (4): 721–724. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0721 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jessica M. Prody; Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2018; 21 (4): 721–724. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0721 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal hung on the whims of a deeply divided Supreme Court. His ninth fireside chat argued for legislation that would grant FDR enough new justices to shift the Court in favor of the New Deal. Facing entrenched opposition to his unpopular plan, Roosevelt presented the president as a constitutional authority who must act in response to the crisis of the Great Depression to drive the three-horse team of government toward recovery. Throughout the text, Roosevelt worked to create a sense of urgency and asked the nation to see this moment as the time for decisive action. This study examines the flow of kairos in the speech, tracing timeliness in Roosevelt’s argument for swift action targeting the Court to safeguard economic recovery. Although Roosevelt did not expand the Court, his language lives on as a model for subsequent executives and part of our public constitutional discourse.

Book Review| September 01 2018 Representing Ebola: Culture, Law, and Public Discourse about the 2013–2015 West African Ebola Outbreak Representing Ebola: Culture, Law, and Public Discourse about the 2013–2015 West African Ebola Outbreak. By Marouf A. Hasian Jr. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickson University Press, 2016; pp. v + 251. $85.00 cloth. Skye de Saint Felix Skye de Saint Felix University of Arkansas–Fayetteville Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (3): 551–554. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.3.0551 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Skye de Saint Felix; Representing Ebola: Culture, Law, and Public Discourse about the 2013–2015 West African Ebola Outbreak. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2018; 21 (3): 551–554. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.3.0551 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This essay situates Abraham Lincoln’s Second Annual Message within the context of previous discourse on African colonization to illuminate the significance of the text as public policy rhetoric. I argue that Lincoln’s proposal for compensated emancipation and colonization in the Second Annual Message was the apotheosis of colonization advocacy. Lincoln’s argumentation navigated the complicated context to make a final, but failed, case for a compromise between North and South before the Final Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

Abstract During the World War II era, a time of civilizational uncertainty, globalism emerged as a rhetorical alternative both to the isolationism predominant before the war and to the Cold War bipolarity that would replace it. A primary advocate for globalism was Wendell Willkie, the failed 1940 Republican presidential candidate who went on to cooperate with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving as his former rival’s proxy and personal representative in two famous overseas trips. While scholarship in rhetorical studies has accounted for the Roosevelt presidency and other forces shaping public discourse during the war and early Cold War, it has generally overlooked the importance of Willkie’s globalism in providing a bipartisan vocabulary with which Americans could describe a postwar peace sustained by interpersonal economics of free trade, global human rights, and burgeoning domestic civil rights. Using Willkie’s 1943 book One World as well as materials from his archives at Indiana University, this essay reads a popular figure and his influential ideas back into our historical narrative, demonstrating how he established what Kenneth Burke termed identification through the use of the related rhetorical strategies of proximity, presence, and ethos, inviting ordinary Americans to imagine a globally interdependent postwar peace.

Abstract In this project, I argue that J. Edgar Hoover’s style of political realism should be studied by critics because it long preceded that of President Harry S. Truman. The style belonged to a stockpile of anti-Communist imagery that helped to shape how the Truman Doctrine speech was drafted and how audiences interpreted its meanings in more local domestic politics. When Truman finally announced that the Soviet Union had challenged international protocol, I argue that he confirmed the vision that his Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director and other detractors had developed throughout the New Deal to discredit reformers who challenged issues of race, labor, and police technique. In this way, anti-Communist containment rhetoric limited the president’s ability to control the domestic security and economic agendas. The stockpile of anti-Communist discourse belonged to, I also argue, a relative of political realism—literary realism and its spinoff, literary naturalism. My final argument is that the FBI director refurbished key tropes in the stockpile, which helped Truman’s congressional opponents invoke Hoover’s authority within the executive branch and thereby displace the president’s credibility as commander in chief. Combined, Hoover and his allies in Congress and elsewhere used rhetorical realism to communicate a deterministic philosophy about human nature through a diffuse mythic narrative, coordinated between Congress, Hollywood, the press, and official FBI discourse.

Abstract This article situates the entrenchment of an American commitment to home ownership at a critical moment in U.S. history—the passage of the National Housing Act of 1934 (NHA). An examination of the introduction, deliberation, and promotion of the legislation reveals how policymakers concretized the value and civic import of residential property. The analysis shows how policymakers, housing advocates, and NHA skeptics collectively framed borrowing for home ownership to be a progressive, secure, and patriotic investment. The NHA discourse illustrates the power of policy rhetoric to define American experiences and prescribe American values.

In 2008, when Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States, many heralded the arrival of a post-racial era. Some were cautious, others seemed to throw caution to the wind, but there was a widespread appreciation, or anticipation, that something new was happening with regard to the role of race in U.S. politics. Daniel Schorr, for example, on National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) All Things Considered, reported that “post-racial” was “the latest buzz word in the political lexicon”; Matt Bai, in the New York Times Magazine, wondered if “black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream”; writing for Forbes, John McWhorter acknowledged that “nothing magically changed when Obama was declared president-elect” but went on to argue that “the election of Obama proved, as nothing else could have,” that racism against African Americans in the United States is no longer “a serious problem.”

Abstract Drawing on stasis theory, this essay explores how the debate frame functions within U.S. journalism. Using the news coverage of Marissa Mayer’s coinciding pregnancy and promotion to Yahoo! CEO and the reportage of Hillary Clinton’s upcoming grandchild during the 2016 precampaign as case studies, I develop a two-part argument. First, by analyzing the rhetorical mechanisms within this media debate, I demonstrate how the debate frame makes facts themselves infinitely debatable, thereby stagnating this public debate at the stasis of fact. This ultimately perpetuates the “having it all” debate—and its sexist assumptions. Second, I consider the escape routes out of this dominant discourse, analyzing how arguments maneuver beyond the stasis of fact to consider policy reforms regarding women in the workplace.

Abstract This essay examines President Barack Obama’s March 28, 2011 address on the war in Libya to theorize a shift in twenty-first-century war rhetoric in which violence is insulated from critique through the numbing of public sensation. In contrast to traditional persuasive appeals aimed at securing collective participation and approval for war, Obama’s oratory is characteristic of “light war,” a mode of conflict that flows more freely by placing few demands on thought, feeling, and attention. I argue that Obama’s rhetoric limits the potential for audiences to sense the material consequences of war through a set of kairotic justifications in which violence is considered “just” in the dual sense that it just ended, and that it is just war, or merely a banal and quotidian version of conflict. After unpacking the anesthetizing features of Obama’s discourse, I conclude by addressing the prospects of resistance given the compressed interval for public thought and feeling to interrupt violent practices.

Abstract The Suez Crisis address, given in response to the exigencies of the Cold War, marked a dramatic shift in presidential rhetoric regarding the Middle East. In this essay I build upon Richard Gregg’s analysis of this speech by demonstrating how President Dwight Eisenhower’s rhetoric broke from previously articulated rationales for American engagement with the region and subtly proposed a new understanding of U.S. responsibility for the region that has yet to be refuted. This speech should be understood as establishing premises in presidential discourse that have been used to mobilize support for American intervention in the Middle East from the Eisenhower Doctrine to the present.

Abstract This article examines the rhetoric of an important, yet understudied, figure in the history of public relations, Bruce Barton. I argue that Barton attempted to mobilize those in the business community to adopt public relations in the creation of a more socially responsible free enterprise through a discourse of evangelical capitalism. Barton’s rhetoric, I argue, positions the corporation as a benevolent shepherd and the public as a submissive and adrift flock in need of salvation. This submissive relationship between public and corporation dovetailed with the technocratic understanding of politics espoused by Walter Lippmann that portrayed the public as a bewildered herd to be guided and mobilized as political leverage by managerial elites, ultimately providing ideological scaffolding for the maintenance and legitimization of corporate power through the appropriation of progressive rhetorics.

Abstract This article examines how rhetoric about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Scottish terrier, Fala, contributed to the president’s public image. I argue that Fala’s presence further enhanced FDR’s more personable presidency by highlighting the president’s warmth and humanity. To demonstrate this claim, I perform a close textual analysis of archival evidence from the FDR Presidential Library and two Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shorts. Presidential pets thus provide presidents with important sources for fashioning their public image.

Book Review| June 01 2016 A Growing Appetite: The Emerging Critical Rhetoric of Food Politics Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health. By Charlotte Biltekoff. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013; pp. 1 + 224. $79.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food. By Lizzie Collingham. New York: Penguin, 2012; pp. 1 + 656. $36.00 cloth; $22.00 paper.Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. By Peter Daniel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013; pp. 1 + 352. $27.95 paper; $24.99 e-book.The Rhetoric of Food: Discourse, Materiality, and Power. Edited by Joshua J. Frye and Michael S. Bruner. New York: Routledge, 2012; pp. 1 + 270. $160 cloth; $51.95 paper.Seeds, Science, and Struggle: The Global Politics of Transgenic Crops. By Abby Kinchy. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012; pp. 1 + 240. $24.00 paper; $17.00 e-book.Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. By Marion Nestle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; pp. 1 + 534. $29.95 paper; $29.95 e-book.The Economics of Food: How Feeding and Fueling the Planet Affects Food Prices. By Patrick Westhoff. Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press/Pearson, 2010; pp. 1 + 256. $25.99 cloth. Stephanie Houston Grey Stephanie Houston Grey Stephanie Houston Grey is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (2): 307–320. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.2.0307 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stephanie Houston Grey; A Growing Appetite: The Emerging Critical Rhetoric of Food Politics. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2016; 19 (2): 307–320. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.2.0307 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: REVIEW ESSAY You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract President Ronald Reagan’s June 6, 1984, “Address on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day” is one of his most celebrated speeches, and yet no critical assessment of the address exists in rhetorical scholarship. In this article, I examine this speech as a deictic epideictic address, or a speech in which the rhetor uses the physical place, the immediate scene/setting, and the assembled audience as evidence to commemorate the past and chart a clear course for the future. Through this analysis, I argue that Reagan’s speech at Pointe du Hoc is exemplary because it relies on rhetorical vision and deixis to connect a past moment to the present, and in so doing, invites the audience to participate in the discourse emotionally, mentally, and even physically. I conclude by suggesting that a deictic approach to rhetorical criticism offers scholars a vocabulary to describe how speakers can “point” or refer to the physical and material elements of a speech setting as evidence for their argument.

Abstract The perceived social value of higher education in the United States and the political will to fund it represents a fascinating paradox. This article explores one way that paradox is reconciled. I look closely at the emergence of a specific educational critique in the discourse of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The critique encourages a neoliberal reinvention of higher education. It does so by constructing symbolic representations that align with preexisting public vocabularies and socially shared orientations reflected in images of the Deserving and Undeserving Poor. By illuminating the discursive techniques by which these representations construct an image of what I call the Undeserving Professor, the critique offers significant theoretical and political insights into an underexplored area of rhetoric, neoliberalism, and public affairs.

Abstract Jesus often spoke about the Christian obligation to provide for the poor. Yet, public opinion polls and scholarly studies consistently find that conservative Protestant voters favor economic policies of low taxes, limited state spending on welfare, and personal responsibility for financial success. This study uses evangelical sermons as a means for analyzing how conservative economic discourse, defined as a preference for limited government interference in market activities, proliferated inside American megachurches over four years following the 2008 recession. It also examines how pastors of large congregations rhetorically justified support for policies that scholars have shown work against the economic interests of middle-class and poor citizens alike. The study found that when megachurch pastors speak about economic issues, they deploy language and arguments that emphasize American economic providence and the need for individuals to take personal responsibility for financial outcomes, premises that afforded pastors the discursive space necessary for making claims about the superiority of private charity over public welfare. These findings suggest that, contrary to arguments that situate the public discourse of conservative Protestants as being mostly about social issues, there is inside evangelicalism a robust conversation about financial questions. This economic discourse is strikingly similar to that of nonreligious conservatives in the United States, a confluence that works to create a rhetorical resonance among the base constituencies inside the Republican Party and so fortify its ideological appeal and strength.

Other| March 01 2015 The Intimate and Ugly Politics of Emancipation Kirt H. Wilson Kirt H. Wilson Kirt H. Wilson is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Public Discourse at Pennsylvania State University in State College. He thanks Charles E. Morris III for organizing this forum and his fellow authors for their insightful interpretations. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (1): 121–128. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.1.0121 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kirt H. Wilson; The Intimate and Ugly Politics of Emancipation. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2015; 18 (1): 121–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.1.0121 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract At the outset of the 2012 presidential race, Republican candidate Mitt Romney touted his private sector leadership of the private equity firm Bain Capital. As this election unfolded, Romney’s Bain Capital story became less of a narrative he could run on and more of a narrative he had to run from. Why did this Bain Capital story, a story about someone’s success in the free marketplace in a society that seemingly values such success, become so troubling for the Romney campaign? This question constitutes the centerpiece of the present essay. In addressing this question, we argue that the Bain Capital narrative’s role in the 2012 presidential race divulges a great deal about the fundamental nature of economic discourse in American democracy. Specifically, we contend that the economic narratives circulating in American democracy actually construct a tale of two economies—a tangible economy and a speculative economy. Unfortunately for Romney, his Bain Capital narrative situated him on the wrong side of this economic divide.

Book Review| March 01 2015 The Teleological Discourse of Barack Obama The Teleological Discourse of Barack Obama. By Richard W. Leeman. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012; pp. vii + 275. $75.00 cloth. Derek Sweet Derek Sweet Luther College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (1): 181–184. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.1.0181 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Derek Sweet; The Teleological Discourse of Barack Obama. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2015; 18 (1): 181–184. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.1.0181 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This essay considers questions about civility raised in the discourse responding to the January 2011 shootings in Tucson, Arizona. Focusing on two sites of discord—the debate in the media and President Obama’s address at the memorial service for the victims—our analysis identifies two conceptions of civility and their corresponding assumptions about democracy and community, provides a critique of both conceptions, and offers a conceptual framework for rhetorical critics studying civility.

Abstract This article explores questions about “civility” in the 2012 election. Through an analysis of media discussions raising the term, four themes are constructed focusing on the limitations of civility discourse. While seeking to preserve the best that civil orientations afford, I argue that adding a deliberative approach to such discourse addresses moments when civil appeals appear to be most limited. This essay finds that working between civil and deliberative constructs provides an instructive perspective for understanding the workings of and possibilities for public discourse during situations when civility rhetoric is typically raised. Relative to civil communication—and associated concepts such as dialogue and advocacy—specific norms, benefits, examples, and implications of a deliberative rhetorical vision are charted for problem-solving, public policy contexts.

Abstract Rhetorical scholarship and cultural commentary have demonstrated that environmentalist voices are consistently associated with apocalyptic rhetoric. However, this association deflects attention from the apocalyptic rhetoric that comes from industry and countermovements to environmentalism. This essay seeks to remedy that oversight by proposing the concept of “industrial apocalyptic” as a significant rhetorical form in environmental controversy. Based on analysis of the rhetoric of the U.S. coal industry, we find that these industrial apocalyptic narratives rely on a burlesque frame to disrupt the categories of establishment and outsider and thus thwart environmental regulation. Ultimately, we argue that industrial apocalyptic co-opts environmentalist appeals for radical change in the service of blocking such change and naturalizes neoliberal ideology as the commonsense discourse of the center.

Book Review| December 01 2013 Public Discourse in America: Conversation and Community in the Twenty-First Century Public Discourse in America: Conversation and Community in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Judith Rodin and Stephen P. Steinberg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003; pp. xv + 336. $24.95 paper. Samuel McCormick Samuel McCormick San Francisco State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2013) 16 (4): 801–806. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.4.0801 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Samuel McCormick; Public Discourse in America: Conversation and Community in the Twenty-First Century. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2013; 16 (4): 801–806. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.4.0801 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This essay revisits William Jennings Bryan's campaign against evolutionary theory through analysis of four rhetorical moments—his platform orations “The Prince of Peace” (beginning in 1904) and “The Menace of Darwinism” (beginning in 1921), his testimony at the Scopes Trial, and his undelivered closing speech, “On Evolution.” In contrast to popular memory of Bryan as the fundamentalist fool, I maintain that he shared little rhetorical ground with his fundamentalist contemporaries, who tended to make arguments that used scientific reasoning to prove empirical facts of religious truth. Instead, Bryan opposed evolution through what Michael Lee has called the “populist argumentative frame,” a rhetorical orientation devoted to guarding the interests of the common people against an oppressive elite. Recognizing the populist foundations to Bryan's anti-evolution discourse, as well as the absence of fundamentalism in his discourse, helps to explain how Bryan fared so badly on the stand at the Scopes Trial.

Abstract Following a democratic uprising in 1998, the Muslim-majority nation of Indonesia embarked on a transition from four decades of authoritarian rule to become the world's third largest democracy. A recent surge in religious intolerance, however, has sparked concern over an apparent backlash against the political and religious pluralism of the new democratic era. As the world looks to this vast country of 237 million as a model for other Muslim nations now rebelling against their own dictatorships, it is important to understand this political turn marked by a growing incapacity to deal with otherness. This article examines public discourse surrounding accelerating attacks on religious minorities in Indonesia to provide insight into a similar rise in intolerance worldwide, and to address a pressing question for many rhetoric scholars: how does religion work to legitimate or eliminate violence?

Research Article| June 01 2013 Religious Dissociation in 2012 Campaign Discourse Kristy Maddux Kristy Maddux Kristy Maddux is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2013) 16 (2): 355–368. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.2.0355 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kristy Maddux; Religious Dissociation in 2012 Campaign Discourse. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2013; 16 (2): 355–368. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.2.0355 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This essay addresses China's Nobel Peace Prize-winning and now imprisoned dissident, Liu Xiaobo, and his movement-launching manifesto, Charter 08, as test cases of the fate of democracy in China. By examining how the Chinese Communist Party attacked Liu and how international nongovernmental organizations and political allies rallied to his cause, the essay probes the limits of human rights discourse in an age of globalization, wherein transnational ideals of justice crash into nation states committed to local rather than global forms of governance. Such rhetorical concerns are tempered by China's increasing dominance of global markets, meaning this essay also studies the complicated relationships among local activists, international justice movements, and neoliberal capitalism. The essay therefore maps how China marshals the rhetoric of globalization to enter new markets even as it deploys the rhetoric of nationalism to block foreign influence. Nonetheless, Charter 08's prophetic rhetoric and Liu's heroic charisma have struck a chord internationally, thus opening a new chapter in the movement to call upon globalizing human rights in the name of building democracy in China.

Abstract This essay addresses rhetorical implications involved in naming national “heroes.” I show that contemporary discourse holds narrow conceptions of heroism that limit who may be granted agency in social narratives and do so by examining one of the quintessential forms of heroism in the United States, namely, wartime heroism. Dominant constructions of “heroism” follow a melodramatic frame that privileges masculine, individualistic actors who rescue the weak by eliminating or conquering the enemy. By examining undertold stories of nurses interned in the Philippines during World War II, I explore rhetorical resources that might broaden this frame to help us envision a “healing heroism.”

Research Article| December 01 2012 Democratic Circulation: Jacksonian Lithographs in U.S. Public Discourse Brandon Inabinet Brandon Inabinet Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (4): 659–666. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940628 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Brandon Inabinet; Democratic Circulation: Jacksonian Lithographs in U.S. Public Discourse. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2012; 15 (4): 659–666. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940628 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| December 01 2012 The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. Steven D. Smith. Kristy Maddux Kristy Maddux Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (4): 737–740. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940635 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kristy Maddux; The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2012; 15 (4): 737–740. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940635 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This essay examines the speech delivered by Vice President John C. Breckinridge on the occasion of the removal of the United States Senate to its new chambers on January 4, 1859. Drawing upon Kenneth Burkes concept of contextual substance, I argue that Breckinridge constructs the Senate’s transition to its new quarters as a defense of constitutional unionism, a conservative political ideology holding that the survival and prosperity of the Union depended upon its continued adherence to the compromises enshrined in the Republics founding document. In an age dominated by increasingly strident rhetorical extremes, constitutional unionism represented a beleaguered vision of Union that was soon eclipsed by the Civil War and today is all but forgotten. Analysis of the Removal Address thus illumines the rhetoric of an important yet neglected political ideology while disclosing the rhetorical "alchemy" by which geometric, familial, and directional substance reconcile continuity and change in leave-taking discourse.

Abstract The American Colonization Society emerged at a time when some Americans believed that a "moderate" solution to the problem of slavery could be achieved by removing free blacks to Africa. Upon announcing its formation in 1816, the society received a public rejoinder: the Counter Memorial against African Colonization. This essay explores multiple interpretations of the Counter Memorial to demonstrate the instability of colonizationists moderate rhetorical position. More specifically, this essay argues that the Counter Memorial suspends colonization within the uneasy and unresolved tensions manifested by competing depictions of blackness, or black personae, in American public discourse at the time.

Abstract In The Politics of Life Itself, Nikolas Rose argues that contemporary genetic medicine has given rise to the "genetically at-risk subject," which is distinguished from other forms of genetic selfhood by the shift from a paradigm of genetic determinism to one of genetic opportunity. This article analyzes the discourse of the genetically at-risk subject in one particular biosocial community (the "previvors" of FORCE) to demonstrate that despite—and in many cases because of—the shift to a paradigm of genetic opportunity, discourses of genetic determinism have not disappeared but instead have mutated in response to new exigences for new audiences. Based on both this analysis and other rhetorical readings of genetic discourse, this article argues that to distinguish among the many types of subjectivity at work within the contemporary era of genetic medicine, we have to understand not only how scientific and biopolitical changes have made those subjectivities possible, but also how the ethical practices associated with specific diseases work rhetorically in communities of those at genetic risk.

Abstract A close textual analysis of Pope Benedict XVI’s inaugural encyclical Deus Caritas Est—God is Love is offered from the perspective of Platonic and contemporary rhetorical theory An acclaimed inspirational success, this letter proposes loving "encounter" and "response" as the fundamental dynamic of Christian communication; God is "felt" and made manifest in concrete love-of-neighbor. Benedicts "contact" orientation has significant implications for contemporary theory—humanity becomes ontologically contiguous, subjects are holistically embodied, Truth is grounded in co-felt exchange, and discourse is decentered by direct public engagement. Deus Caritas Est draws attention to ethical limits in Dramatism and Logology and advances embodied, invitational, and theological perspectives on rhetorical theory by showing how genuine love initiates and feeds a divine dynamic that can transcend divisions and unite humanity.

Abstract President Obama’s commencement address on the University of Notre Dame campus evoked substantial controversy, providing public demonstration of rhetorical differences and demands generated by differing provincial and cosmopolitan positions. Icontend that public civic rhetoric, in an era of narrative and virtue contention, must address the creative interplay of both provincial and cosmopolitan perspectives. In this essay I examine reactions to the Obama address from news sources connected with the local Catholic diocese, as well as the South Bend and University of Notre Dame newspapers. I argue that Obamas address is an example of a public civic speech that openly engaged the interplay of provincial and cosmopolitan understandings of a controversial communal common center. Obamas Notre Dame speech framed discourse that walks within a world of tension and difference on the public stage, highlighting the communal rhetorical constitution of a speech moment shaped through the interplay of provincial and cosmopolitan commitments.

Abstract Progressive reformers frequently spoke a moral language, bringing abstract moral laws to bear on the social, economic, and political turmoil of the early twentieth century. However, this form of moral discourse often proved ineffective for grasping the complexities of the time. In this essay I turn to Louis Brandeiss progressive advocacy to uncover an alternative form of moral speech, one that was better attuned to the changing nature of society. As I argue, Brandeis articulated what one might call "transactional morality," crafting a rhetoric that hinged upon the interconnection of morality, economics, and democratic citizenship. By infusing his moral speech with economic terminology and an abiding concern for civic participation, Brandeis directed the nations attention to the moral costs and benefits of an emerging industrial democracy. The result was a form of moral engagement that not only avoided the problems other progressives encountered but also reconfigured morality in response to radical social change.

Abstract More than ten years after his death, Matthew Shepard is still remembered prominently in LGBT discourse. This discourse has been used to defy heteronormative characterizations of violence, confirm gay and lesbian identity, and to "queer" rigid notions of community. Tracing Shepard s memory through three contested memory frames, I argue for an expanded perspective of queer counterpublic memories and the strategic use of public memories by counterpublics.

Abstract Abraham Lincoln’s 1842 Temperance Address can be understood as an act of cultural criticism delivered in epideictic form in which the young politician demonstrated his leadership ability by presenting his political philosophy. Lincoln exploited the capacious indeterminacy of meaning afforded by the discourse of the flourishing temperance movement to address indirectly problems plaguing the American republic, namely incivility and slavery. Offering only hushed praise for Washington, Lincoln silenced the slaveholding founders so that the sensibilities of a new generation of men could be heard. Lincoln constructed a Whig manhood grounded in ideals of entrepreneurialism and restraint that demonstrated his fitness to lead his party and the Second American Revolution.

Abstract This article examines the public controversy surrounding the National Park Services decision about how best to recognize the site of the nations first executive mansion—the Presidents House—in Philadelphias Independence National Historical Park. The first of the houses two presidential occupants, George Washington, kept nine slaves in the mansion while circumventing a Pennsylvania law that could have given the slaves their freedom. The National Park staff’s resistance to acknowledging Washingtons actions led to an ongoing and lengthy public debate that eventually resulted in the decision to build an installation that recognized all of the occupants of the house. Advocates for building such a site invoked two types of vernacular discourse—a counternarrative ("Liberty has been incompletely enacted") and a representative anecdote ("Excavating buried history")—that embraced the traditions of storytelling at Independence National Historical Park.

Abstract The tradition of postcolonial critique has long noted that the construction of an imperial identity of "alterity," the posture of moral superiority that serves to differentiate the imperialist from those under his or her control and thus legitimate the practice of expansion, is a significant characteristic of imperial discourse. For the most party however, this critical practice has focused on the construct of alterity as a justification for imperial oppression on the basis ofracialized images of subject populations. This essay approaches alterity as a property to be maintained by the imperial culture itself as crucial to its understanding of its own identity. Failure to maintain such an identity constitutes the ultimate "sin" of identity slippage, a "sin" that undermines the moral validity of empire. This argument is detailed through an analysis of Edmund D. Morels book-length exposé of Belgian atrocities committed against the peoples of the Congo entitled King Leopolds Rule in Africa. Morels text is not so much concerned with evoking reader pity for the plight of the Congolese as with inciting outrage over the subversion of imperialism by the Belgians’ abandonment of their own imperial alterity.

Abstract This essay argues for a reprivileging of the object of speech in the study of public address. To this end, public discourse concerning the tonal qualities of male and female speech, particularly in moments of affective transgression, is examined to better discern our deeply gendered, cultural norms of eloquence. The primary case study analyzes reactions to the oratory ofBarack Obama and Hillary Clinton to show how their respective vocal tones played a significant role in the 2008 presidential election.