Recent work in immigration suggests interconnections among race, nation, and immigration. This essay examines these relations, noting the rhetorical dynamics through which symbolic borders emerge and shift, in part through national debates over immigrants. Turning critical attention to mediated representations of Mexican immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s, I argue that Mexican immigrant bodies provided rhetorical space for a national discussion of race and nation. I highlight, in particular, a deportation drive and repatriation campaign that resulted in the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

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Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration

In a videotape analysis of five National Issues Forums, I investigate the nature of deliberative talk in small group deliberative settings. I show that deliberative talk in these forums mostly takes the form of storytelling. I argue that storytelling helps participants overcome barriers to deliberation, such as lack of knowledge and the need to manage one's public face in a context that privileges open conflict. Moreover, I show that storytelling also plays an important collective function for groups, allowing them to build a sense of moral community around issues without much explicit conflict or argument. I conclude that greater understanding of storytelling's role in small group deliberation is of benefit both to practitioners who initiate such forums and to the growing number of researchers who study the practice of deliberative democracy.

Narrative and Deliberation in Small Group Forums

This essay draws upon the work of Northrop Frye to show that stories enacting the American Dream contain elements associated with romance, and briefly traces how Ronald Reagan and conservatives utilized the romance of the American Dream to the point that many Americans associated it exclusively with conservatism. The essay then details how Barack Obama, in his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, recast the American dream from a conservative to a liberal story.

Recasting the American Dream and American Politics: Barack Obama's Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention

Values advocacy: Enhancing organizational images, deflecting public criticism, and grounding future arguments

This essay begins by suggesting that political discourse analysis should identify the inadequacies of existing discourse relative to an ideal model of democratic deliberation. Modern writings on political discourse are then reviewed, connecting related concepts and theories from a variety of academic disciplines. The review discusses lexicon (vocabulary, technical words, imprecise words, euphemisms and loaded words), grammar (speech acts, implicature, syntax, pronouns and naming conventions), rhetorical strategies (integrative complexity, rituals, metaphors and myths) and conversational tactics (turn-taking and agenda-setting). The conclusion offers suggestions for future theory and research on political discourse.

Undemocratic Discourse: A Review of Theory and Research on Political Discourse

The character of Reagan's rhetoric and the response to it can be explained by its narrative form. The dominance of narrative in Reagan's discourse and the nature of the narrative form combine to differentiate the perspective of Reagan's supporters and his opponents. Three characteristics of narrative form—a story‐based truth, an emphasis on morality, and a grounding in common sense—explain the way in which narrative affects political judgment. The analysis reveals the power of narrative form and, in contrast to the assertions of some narrative theorists, its fragility and moral limitations.

Telling America's story: Narrative form and the Reagan presidency

This essay continues the challenge to the image of law as neutral adjudication by arguing that, while authoritative judicial discourse in the modern liberal state has presented itself as realistic discourse that argues to singular conclusions, it is better to see it as a profoundly rhetorical enterprise that writes legal decisions as romances in which Law is the heroic central character. Focusing on the first flag burning case Texas v. Johnson, the essay examines the decision as argument and as romance. It concludes by suggesting that the case (and legal decisions in general) would benefit from a sense of law at once more rhetorically sensitive, communal, and tragic.

Of innocence, exclusion, and the burning of flags: The romantic realism of the law

Conventional wisdom presumes that power resides in the President’s office. So, when error or misconduct is suspected, a set of familiar questions are raised: What really happened? Who did what and why did they do it? How much did the President know and when did he know it? If he did know, how could he have made such bad decisions? If he didn’t know, how could he have been so out of touch?’ These are the questions of political scandal and investigative journalism conceived within a framework of political understanding that seeks to establish personal accountability, to reveal personal excesses. When questions such as these were raised in November 1986 about the

William F. Lewis

Papers

Telling America's story: Narrative form and the Reagan presidency

Of innocence, exclusion, and the burning of flags: The romantic realism of the law

Politics in the Mode of Realism: Reagan, the Hostages, and the Limits of Narrative Form: