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Showing papers in "Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2003"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors implicitly ask communication theorists and critics to read important poets and novelists, not just in the sense of reading more, but by reading more alertly, and they call us to glimpse connections across terrains of knowing, to build our own lessons from them, to confirm others' concrete presence even as we must stand up to them, and to recognize deeper and more organic links.
Abstract: brings rigorous and first-rate intellects into my life and dares me to be a better and more versatile reader. More specifically, these works implicitly ask communication theorists and critics to read important poets and novelists, not just in the sense of reading more, but by reading more alertly. They call us to glimpse connections across terrains of knowing, to build our own lessons from them, to confirm others’ concrete presence even as we must stand up to them, and to recognize deeper and more organic links. Moreover, consistent with a concrete philosophy of dialogue, they each ask readers to respond, despite the clutter and ill-formed meanings of our own lives. I look at my messy desk, and know I have time for that.

199 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors analyzed the politics of these two publics in an attempt to illustrate the limits of a binary conceptualization of publics and counterpublics and to emphasize the rhetorical value of the cultural performances that constitute public life.
Abstract: Since 1984, October has been recognized in the U.S. as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. In 1997, the Toxic Links Coalition of the Bay Area, California, began organizing annual “Stop Cancer Where It Starts” tours to counter attempts to obscure the environmentally-linked causes of cancer. By drawing on research including participant observation, this essay analyzes the politics of these two publics in an attempt to illustrate the limits of a binary conceptualization of publics and counterpublics and to emphasize the rhetorical value of the cultural performances that constitute public life.

165 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The appeal of post-September 11 discourse lies in its similarities with the Puritan rhetoric of covenant renewal by which ministers brought second-and third-generation Puritans into the church.
Abstract: The appeal of Bush's post-September 11 discourse lies in its similarities with the Puritan rhetoric of covenant renewal by which ministers brought second- and third-generation Puritans into the church. Through this epideictic discourse, Bush implored younger Americans to uphold the national covenant of their “elders,” the World War II generation, through support of the war on terrorism, and he revitalized the faith of the older generation. Bush's covenant renewal rhetoric in the context of September 11 inaugurated him into the presidency. It also explains his predilection for unilateral and/or pre-emptive action and his call for acts of local community service.

124 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Patterson et al. as mentioned in this paper discuss the diachronic path of "animal" and how the term has been used to denigrate both lower species and "savages", or so-called lower classes, races, and ethnicities of humans.
Abstract: American as apple pie” (231). Certainly one would agree with this statement given enslavement, labor abuses, ethnic and gender disenfranchisement, and exterminatory westward expansion. Connecting these abuses with animals, however, takes some work. To satisfy this burden, Patterson details the diachronic path of “animal,” and illumines how the term has been used to denigrate both lower species and “savages,” or so-called lower classes, races, and ethnicities of humans. Chapters one and two examine the 11,000 year tradition of domesticating animals, and how humans have vilified “others” as animals in the same tradition. Patterson performs a phenomenal task by classifying the ways in which Western culture has metonymically reduced non-white others to animal status. Starting with African populations, he discusses how white explorers like Sir Charles Lyell, while traversing the “dark continent,” would log in his journal such epithets as, “The brain of the bushmen leads towards the brain of the Simian” (29). Patterson’s argument that slavery hinged on such animal metonyms gains support from imperial narratives from the East India Company, European physicians, and American anatomists, plantation owners, and eugenicists. Regarding American Indians, Patterson points to classic racists such as Hugh Brackenridge and Andrew Jackson to illustrate the power of the animal metonym in colonizing, “caging” (as savages) on reservations, and “exterminating” (as pests) native populations. Even jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes and editor L. Frank Baum are seen as propagating the animal-as-justification discourse. Holmes exhorts whites to “hunt him [the Indian] down like the wild beasts of the forest . . . so that the red crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God’s own image” (35). In this case, the American Indian is reduced first to an animal, and then to an object of utility—a “crayon.” The foregoing data has been publicized. What makes Patterson’s attack on frontier rhetoric unique is its extension to the Spanish-American War, the Philippine invasion, World War Two, Red China, Vietnam, and even Iraq. Consider Major General Adna Chaffee’s 1899 comments about Philippino rebels: “we killed them like rabbits . . . no cruelty is too severe for these brainless monkeys . . . (they) are a miserable-looking lot of little brown rats” (39). Such sentiments carried into the 20th century. John Dower describes the Japanese during World War Two as “animals, reptiles, or insects, monkeys, baboons, gorillas, dogs, mice and rats, vipers and rattlesnakes, cockroaches, vermin—or, more indirectly, ‘the Japanese herd’ ” (39). Patterson details the continuation of this process; the Red Chinese as “chink dogs,” the Viet Cong as “termites,” and the Iraqis as “cockroaches of the desert” provide a fresh look at how the United States has vilified the “other” by way of the “animal” label. Chapter three develops a controversial discussion of Jewish denigration at the hands of the Nazis. Patterson posits that U. S. destruction of Africans and American Indians provided a template for Hitler to follow. Moreover, he contends that the U. S. business of factory farming (in the vein of Sinclair’s report in The Jungle) afforded the Third Reich a system of gathering, feeding, and expeditious slaughter. Regarding the former, evidence exists that Hitler lauded America’s genocidal solution to the alleged “Indian” problem. To link animal slaughterhouses with human concentration camps, however, evokes debate. The connection Patterson makes places animals and European Jewry in the same class. By comparing industries, he compares the victims of the industries. Thus, to admit Patterson’s point, we group Jewish and animal victims together; this move raises issues of inconsistency vis-à-vis the brutal criticism of Western culture found in chapters one and two. Despite this controversial homology, Patterson does a service to Holocaust studies and rhetorical approaches to animal rights. That is, he illustrates the reduction of Jews to animals and demonstrates the importance of animal rights to human rights. If factory farms—not to mention fur ranches, clothing mills, breeding barns, and animal entertainment facilities—represent the 21st century’s concentration camps, then we should work to eradicate the evil to prevent more murders. This review neither supports nor rejects Patterson’s argument; it respects the argument for its contribution to homological studies, movement criticism, and ideographic analysis. Eternal Treblinka offers much to scholars interested in cultural studies, social movements, Holocaust studies, cultural memory, and rhetorical homology.

90 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that George Lakoff's discussion of the nation-as-family metaphor illuminates the political potency and the potential effectiveness of maternal appeals as well as their implications for gender norms.
Abstract: The causes for which maternity has been invoked are as divergent as they are ubiquitous, yet the popularity of maternal politics among activists is not matched by an equally enthusiastic or unified assessment from scholars. On the contrary, scholars vigorously debate maternal appeals' strategic efficacy as well as their implications for gender norms. In this essay I argue that George Lakoff's discussion of the nation-as-family metaphor illuminates the political potency and the potential effectiveness of maternal appeals as well as their implications for gender norms. I illustrate my argument through an analysis of the Million Mom March.

72 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust is discussed, with a focus on the treatment of animals and their treatment of the holocaust.
Abstract: (2003). Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 89, No. 1, pp. 83-84.

64 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that reconciliation is a rhetorical concept, a performance and norm of rhetorical practice that transcends violence less than it turns its historical justification toward mutual oppositions that call for the character (ethos) of understanding.
Abstract: What is reconciliation? A source of historical puzzlement and contemporary controversy over how to make history, this question asks after those words which constitute a beginning (again), that moment in which endless cycles of conflict give way to the hope for “unity in difference.” Concerned with the dynamics of its operation, the present essay contends that reconciliation is a rhetorical concept, a performance and norm of rhetorical practice that transcends violence less than it turns its historical justification toward mutual oppositions that call for(th) the character (ethos) of understanding. A challenge to both the logic and politics of identity, an opposing and relating of that which is held to be exclusive, reconciliation is thus difficult to define. From a reading of the concept's history, I investigate this definitional puzzle through consideration of how the substance of reconciliation appears within its potential, the capacity to open a time for expression, invent the grounds for speech-action...

61 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that irony may facilitate audience acceptance of the very ideas the satirist intends to disparage, in this case, Garner's use of satiric humor may have facilitated acceptance of moderate forms of political correctness.
Abstract: By July 1994, Politically Correct Bedtime Stories had appeared for the third time on the New York Times bestseller list with sales exceeding 100,000 copies. One year later, there were almost 1.5 million copies of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories in print as it continued to excite public commentary. This popular book is an ideal case study for exploring the benefits and limits of satiric humor, the book's primary rhetorical strategy and the focus of this essay. We argue that because of its polyvalent nature, the use of ironic satire as a rhetorical strategy to debunk a position is unpredictable. In fact, as this essay demonstrates, some forms of humor may facilitate audience acceptance of the very ideas the satirist intends to disparage. In this case, Garner's use of satiric humor may have facilitated acceptance of moderate forms of political correctness.

52 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the ways in which imitation, as a concept and as a practice, was caught up in the nineteenth century's racial politics and argues that the interpretation of mimesis labels the imitator and either sustains or reconstitutes power relations within the context of mimetic performance.
Abstract: This essay examines the ways in which imitation, as a concept and as a practice, was caught up in the nineteenth century's racial politics. Theoretically, it argues that the interpretation of mimesis labels the imitator and either sustains or reconstitutes power relations within the context of mimetic performance. Historically, the essay contends that during the nineteenth century, and especially after the Civil War, black imitation threatened the dominant systems of white power. European Americans interpreted black mimesis as a primitive instinct, the sign of an inferior "other." Conversely, African Americans used imitation to exercise their liberty and pursue civil rights. Frederick Douglass viewed imitation as a progressive force in public life, and his conceptualization represents an alternative to the reductive construct that existed at the beginning of the twentieth century and continues today.

47 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors defend symbolic convergence theory from an imaginary Gunn, arguing that it is not the same as the one presented in the present paper, and defend the convergence theory.
Abstract: (2003). Defending symbolic convergence theory from an imaginary Gunn. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 89, No. 4, pp. 366-372.

46 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors retells the history of U. S. rhetorical studies as a negotiation over the meaning of the concepts of invention and imagination, and concludes by urging a consideration of the "imaginary," a psychoanalytic understanding of the collective unconscious, as a concept that may help to reconcile disciplinary tensions regarding the status of the rhetorical agent.
Abstract: This essay retells the history of U. S. rhetorical studies as a negotiation over the meaning of the concepts of invention and imagination. By providing a genealogical outline of the transformation of the imagination in rhetorical theory, a trend toward an increasingly contingent, "posthumanist" understanding of the rhetorical agent emerges, reaching its fullest elaboration in symbolic convergence theory. Instead of accepting the possibility that some rhetorical processes are primarily unconscious, however, U. S. rhetorical scholars, including Ernest Bormann, continued to defend the fully conscious, autonomous subject or elided the question of agency by advancing "ideological" and "materialist" theories focused on abstract populations, publics, or audiences. The essay concludes by urging a consideration of the "imaginary," a psychoanalytic understanding of the collective unconscious, as a concept that may help to reconcile disciplinary tensions regarding the status of the rhetorical agent.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For example, Douglass's oration, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" as mentioned in this paper, is a rhetorical masterwork of irony and illustrates a strategy for enlisting the liberatory potential inherent in the detached and multiple perspective of irony without allowing that detachment to culminate in political impotence.
Abstract: Frederick Douglass's oration, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" is a rhetorical masterwork of irony. It illustrates a strategy for enlisting the liberatory potential inherent in the detached and multiple perspective of irony without allowing that detachment to culminate in political impotence. The speech accomplishes this through opening before its audience the expansive visual and temporal spaces in which irony thrives, then collapsing those spaces so irony cannot be sustained. The speech therefore exemplifies a kairotic management of irony's scopic attitude, emphasizing for its audience the importance of seeing when irony is appropriate and when it is not.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper analyzed a speech in which Alvertis Simmons, a member of the Denver, Colorado, African American community, engaged a panel of school board officials on the topic of racial stereotypes in an elementary school science experiment.
Abstract: This article answers critical and theoretical calls for the study of ordinary talk by analyzing a transcribed speech in which Alvertis Simmons, a member of the Denver, Colorado, African American community, engaged a panel of school board officials on the topic of racial stereotypes in an elementary school science experiment. Simmons's discourse can be shown symbolically to reorganize features of integrationist and nationalist ways of speaking-two dominant strands of mid- to late-twentieth century African American public address. Building a theory of "oratorical influence" from these intertextual relationships, this essay concludes that the force of public discourse may reside less in a speaker's ability to persuade an audience than in an audience's willingness to recycle and revise figural aspects of a speaker's discourse in their everyday talk. An interpretive stance such as this can encourage rhetorical critics to expand their objects of critique, to include more ordinary ways of speaking that follow af...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For instance, in this article, a speaker recognizes in her own speech that a foreign body is possessed of a familiar spirit, and the foreign body will keep coming and going as our most intimate familiar.
Abstract: bodies in intercourse within a lived space—in the “life-world” to wax phenomenological. John Durham Peters may be right that for centuries we have been doing nothing but “speaking into the air” in pursuit of an impossible melding of minds in respect to the concept of communication. Yet as Connor would remind us, where there is speech, there is the production of self. And in the production of self, in the staging of voice-as-speaking, there must also be the non-self, the Other, the “foreigner,” or “babbling barbarian.” One soon recognizes in her own speech that “the foreign body is . . . one possessed of a familiar spirit.” Hence, the “unpronounceable, unrenounceable foreign word for a foreign body in the body [ventrioloqua] will keep coming and going as our . . . most intimate familiar” (417).

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A reading of one of the largest public commemorative projects in recent U.S. history, the Celebrate the Century stamp program, in order to explore the ambivalent potential of collective memory in postmodernity is presented in this article.
Abstract: This essay offers a reading of one of the largest public commemorative projects in recent U.S. history, the Celebrate the Century stamp program, in order to explore the ambivalent potential of collective memory in postmodernity. Celebrate the Century exhibits the tension between aesthetic and political heterogeneity, on the one hand, and the tendency toward commodification and political amnesia, on the other. The essay develops by considering the evolution of commemorative postal iconography and its relation to postmodern simulacra, the process of selection of stamp subjects for Celebrate the Century , and the array of display strategies that helped to frame the collection as a commodity, the public as tourists, and history as progress toward consumer democracy.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue against resistant labor rhetoric that is ill-suited to present conditions of temp work, and advocate a rhetoric of "performativity" that enables temps to carve out their own definitional territory and seek advantage within an oppressive management culture.
Abstract: This essay analyzes contemporary temporary employment texts and the competing rhetorical definitions that shape the meanings of employment and identity in the contingent economy. Arguing against resistant labor rhetoric that is ill-suited to present conditions of temp work, the author locates and advocates a rhetoric of "performativity" that enables temps to carve out their own definitional territory and seek advantage within an oppressive management culture. Ultimately, rhetorical tactics of performativity enable resistant practices that are better suited to contingent situations, and show promise for new conceptions of identity for these and other disenfranchised members of the U.S. workforce.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the ways in which the rhetoric of the reparations debate elucidates the varying accounts of history favored by Americans of different backgrounds, the political and ideological foundations underlying different perspectives on the nature and uses of history, and the norms guiding public deliberation in the contemporary U.S. about how to remember the past.
Abstract: This essay examines the ways in which the rhetoric of the reparations debate elucidates the varying accounts of history favored by Americans of different backgrounds, the political and ideological foundations underlying different perspectives on the nature and uses of history, and the norms guiding public deliberation in the contemporary U.S. about how to remember the past. Because the controversy explicitly connects questions about race and cultural memory, it has generated positions that seem irresolvable; yet, ironically, the debate suggests ways in which rhetoric about race in the U.S. might begin to move beyond current impasses.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors traces the alliance of the paradeigma with inductive science to an unstable fault-line in our Aristotelian heritage, then retraces the path of the prudential tradition by following the long and distinguished career of the rhetorical example in the West in order to reclaim this heritage and to challenge the pre-eminence of inductive subsumption.
Abstract: Many rhetoricians treat argument from example as a kind of induction, an illustration of a general principle. Although this is one function of example, consistent with Aristotle's statements about the paradeigma and The New Rhetoric's argumentation by example, it camouflages the practice of exemplary proof that has contributed to our richest sense of rhetorical understanding. Inductive example allies itself with the principles of theoretical science and contradicts Aristotle's insight that rhetoric functions where rules or systems are wanting. A properly rhetorical understanding of the exemplum does not work through a universal, implicit or otherwise, but follows a sideways movement from particular to particular. This essay traces the alliance of the paradeigma with inductive science to an unstable fault-line in our Aristotelian heritage, then retraces the path of the prudential tradition by following the long and distinguished career of the rhetorical example in the West in order to reclaim this heritage and to challenge the pre-eminence of inductive subsumption.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Five court cases involving traditional midwives in the 1970s in California and in the 1990s in New York are examined to examine emerging legal definitions of medical caregivers and the success or failure of certain forms of resistance to these definitions.
Abstract: Because Roe v. Wade left ill-defined or derivative just who could be a medical caregiver for pregnant women, courts struggled in the post-Roe medico-legal environment to decide just who could be a medical advisor in this newly recognized zone of privacy. The courts also were challenged to balance individual privacy rights, state interest in health and potential life, and medical authority when dealing with alternative caregivers. This article examines five court cases involving traditional midwives in the 1970s in California and in the 1990s in New York. The cases afford the opportunity to examine emerging legal definitions of medical caregivers and the success or failure of certain forms of resistance to these definitions.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca as mentioned in this paper created the new rhetoric project, which is perhaps the most influential system of rhetoric of the twentieth century. But it has not yet been translated into French.
Abstract: In search of justice, Chaı̈m Perelman alone and in collaboration with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca created the “new rhetoric” project, which is perhaps the most influential system of rhetoric of the twentieth century. Some of the project’s articles and books have been translated into English, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. I do not question the brilliance and importance of Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric, but his writings have yet to be translated into French. The rhetoric entry in the 2003 online version of the Encyclopædia Britannica features the new rhetoric, including a condensed version of the longer 1970 chapter by Perelman in Britannica’s Great Ideas Today series. Oxford’s 2001 Encyclopedia of Rhetoric has a host of entries documenting the influence of the new rhetoric. In his entry on “Philosophy and Rhetoric,” Brian Vickers writes that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s work is “one of the most influential modern formulations of rhetorical theory”; Dilip Gaonkar on “Contingency and Probability” observes that Perelman made a “founding distinction between demonstration and argumentation”; J. Robert Cox’s entry on the “Irreparable” reports that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s rhetoric is “groundbreaking”; Thomas Jesse Roach notes that “Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are the first to offer a prominent position to expository discourse as genre of rhetoric”; Barbara Warnick devotes her entire entry on conviction to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theories of rhetoric and argumentation. Contributors making entries on argumentation, arrangement, exemplum, the forensic genre, inference, law and rhetoric, logos, pathos, practical reason, and rhetoric and religion also cite the influence of Perelman or his collaboration with Olbrechts-Tyteca. Many contemporary book-length studies of justice, argument, and rhetoric are influenced by and reference Perelman’s writings and those of the new rhetoric project. Among the more conspicuous of these recent works are David Raphael’s Concepts of Justice (Oxford University Press), Thomas Farrell’s The Norms of Rhetorical Culture (Yale University Press), and James Crosswhite’s The Rhetoric of Reason (University of Wisconsin University Press). There are, of course, excellent chapters on Perelman and his collaborations with Olbrechts-Tyteca in: Foss, Foss, and Trapp; Conley; Bizzell and Herzberg; and Kennedy. The works of Perelman and the new rhetoric project are found in a diverse array of articles in the scholarly literature. In the last three years, the new rhetoric project has been cited in Welt Der Slaven-Halbjahresschrift Fur Slavistik, Arbor-Ciencia Pensamiento, Zeitschrift Fur Die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Und Die Kunde Der Alteren Kirche, Etudes Francaises, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Political Geography, and a number of other journals. In comparison, Kenneth Burke is often cited in English language journals, but one finds Perelman rather than Burke in the footnotes of German and French publications on rhetorical themes. The 1958 publication of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s magnus opus, Traité de l’Argumentation: La Nouvelle Rhétorique, changed rhetorical studies. James Crosswhite declares the Traité “the single most important event in contemporary rhetorical theory.” Michael Leff writes that the 1970 English translation of Traité was a “bombshell” in U.S. studies of argumentation and rhetoric. Henry W. Johnstone reviewed the Traité twice, the original French rendition in 1958 and the English translation in 1970. In the latter review, Johnstone concluded that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s survey of argumentative techniques “may not be surpassed for another hundred years.” Perelman’s aspiration was to unveil an expression of reason that would navigate between the “cold logic” Hannah Arendt detected in totalitarianism and the nihilism of radical skepticism. The realm of rhetoric, Perelman argued, is that space between apodictic logic and aporia, the sphere of experience and action. Demonstration and formal logic, Perelman argued, are limited to the abstract and the vita contemplativa. Perelman sought to liberate reason from the constrictions of formal logic and to recover the role rhetoric played in the vita activa during the Renaissance, which, according to Dominic A. LaRusso, was “marked by its concern for humanitas, that unique blend of conception, passion, and expression.”

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examined the events surrounding Justice Black's controversial nomination to the Supreme Court, focusing on his nationally broadcast radio address on October 1, 1937, to answer charges that the then Alabama Senator was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Abstract: Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, known for being a liberal First Amendment absolutist and a courageous defender of individual freedom, is considered one of the best justices ever to serve on the nation's high court. This essay examines the events surrounding Justice Black's controversial nomination to the Supreme Court, focusing on his nationally broadcast radio address on October 1, 1937, to answer charges that the then Alabama Senator was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Utilizing archival research from both the Franklin Roosevelt and Hugo Black papers, the analysis focuses on how Black's rhetorical philosophy and his adaptation to multiple audiences resulted in a remarkable "minimalist" address that, despite first impressions, ultimately contributed to his success in pacifying the situation.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The AFFIRMING FLAME: A POETICS OF MEANING as mentioned in this paper is a collection of poems written by WALTER ONG and published by Prometheus Books.
Abstract: THE AFFIRMING FLAME: A POETICS OF MEANING. By Maurice Friedman. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999; pp. 252. $50.00. WALTER ONG’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORLD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION. By Thomas J. Farrell. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; pp. 309. $27.50. CULTIVATING HUMANITY: A CLASSICAL DEFENSE OF REFORM IN LIBERAL EDUCATION. By Martha C. Nussbaum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997; pp. 328. $16.95.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper examined the summary view of the rights of British America as evidence of his craft as a storyteller and concluded that it represents the first declaration of independence of the United States from the British Crown.
Abstract: This essay examines Jefferson's Summary View of the Rights of British America as evidence of his craft as a storyteller. Specifically, I argue that Jefferson deploys a series of narrative renderings, the rhetorical effect of which is to eliminate the possibility of any genuine reconciliation with the English government. On the basis of this interpretation I conclude that the Summary View represents Jefferson's first declaration of independence.