Showing papers in "Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2008"

Political Parody and Public Culture

Abstract: Parody and related forms of political humor are essential resources for sustaining democratic public culture. They do so by exposing the limits of public speech, transforming discursive demands into virtual images, setting those images before a carnivalesque audience, and celebrating social leveling while decentering all discourses within the “immense novel” of the public address system. Parody culminates in modern laughter, which is the shock of delighted dislocation when mediation is revealed. That laughter provides a rhetorical education for engaged spectatorship.

The New “New”: Making a Case for Critical Affect Studies

Abstract: Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), vii + 224 pp. $95.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper). Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University P...

An Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form: Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency

Abstract: Rhetorical agency is the capacity for words and actions to be intelligible and forceful, and to create effects through their formal and stylistic conventions. The polemical discourses of Larry Kramer, a controversial AIDS activist, demonstrate a concurrence of features that define the polemic as a rhetorical form and therefore enable agency: alienating expressions of emotion; non-contingent assertions of truth; presumptions of shared morality; and the constitution of enemies, audiences, and publics. The unexpected uptake of Kramer's texts by academics invites consideration of the polemic as a queer form that resists the assumption of a necessary and predictable relationship between an intending agent and an action's effects. Thus, the polemic highlights the riskiness, unpredictability, and inevitable contingency of agency, and positions queerness itself as the condition of possibility for any rhetorical act.

A Clockwork War: Rhetorics of Time in a Time of Terror

Abstract: Expressions of time have increasingly infused the rhetorical experience of post-industrial war, especially since 9/11. This essay demonstrates how these “signs of time” operate as one of three tropes: deadline/countdown, infinite/infinitesimal war, and the ticking clock. The persistence of such signs of time in public discourse can be seen as an expression of what Paul Virilio has called the “chronopolis,” a political universe textured by real-time communication technologies. The chronopolitical will exhibits certain autocratic traits at odds with democratic ideals, primarily the refashioning of citizen identity into that of the “contemporary.” The analysis here charts the autocratic rhetoric of the chronopolis as a critical democratic project.

Race and Genetics from a Modal Materialist Perspective

Abstract: Prevailing idealist and materialist theories of rhetoric fail to account for the continual circulation and recirculation of “racism” as a scientific discourse. An alternative theory of modal materialism addresses this problem by suggesting that the properties of all being are constituted through three distinguishable forms of matter that include the “physical,” the “biological,” and the “symbolic.” A sufficiently lush and nimble conceptualization of human action requires consideration of the interaction of all three modes in theory and in practice. The theory of modal materialism is illustrated through a consideration of the discourse of race and genetics as it was recirculated and modified in 2005 and 2006 by publications in the journal Science, and which were amplified for a larger reading public through circulation in the New York Times.

Speech Is Dead; Long Live Speech

Abstract: Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans Paul A Kottman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), xxv + 264 pp $2595 Mladen Dolar, A Voi

For the Love of Rhetoric, with Continual Reference to Kenny and Dolly

Abstract: Few contemporary scholars have explicitly discussed the relationship between love and rhetoric. This essay draws on the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that rhetoricians have been reluctant to theorize love for two reasons: first, it is already implied in the widely accepted concept of identification; and second, any explicit discussion of love tempts kitsch. Once we understand love and kitsch as homologous constructs, it is argued, we are better able to engage rhetoric more directly as a form of love or, alternately, as a form of deceit.

The ‘Shocking Story’ of Emmett Till and the Politics of Public Confession

Abstract: In 1955, journalist William Bradford Huie interviewed Emmett Till's killers and published their confession in Look magazine. Titled “The Shocking Story of Approved Murder in Mississippi,” Huie's tale dominated the remembrance of Emmett Till for nearly fifty years. This essay argues that the power of the “Shocking Story” to control the memory of Till's murder resides in its recourse to the “expressive confession,” the distinctive power of which is a capacity to naturalize historical events and thereby constitute a master narrative of inevitability in which further rhetorical intervention seems unnecessary. So understood, the “Shocking Story” is not just one more recounting of Till's untimely death; it is also a treatise about the role of speech in the violence of the Mississippi Delta.

Eisenhower and the American Sublime

Abstract: This essay presents Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential rhetoric as an iteration of an American synecdochal sublime. Eisenhower's rhetoric sought to re-aim civic sight beyond corporeal objects to the nation's transcendental essence. This rhetoric is intimately connected to prevailing political anxieties and exigencies, especially the problem of “the Bomb” and the related philosophy of deterrence. Over and against the material presence of the atomic bomb, which threatened to concentrate national energies, Eisenhower advanced an expansive vision of national “spiritual” being to which corporeal images could only gesture. Correlatively, he positioned himself as a kind of priestly mediator. Therefore, he not only justified a strong deterrent stance in the Cold War, but made moral sense of it.

Ironic Openings: The Interpretive Challenge of the “Black Manifesto”

Abstract: For generations, critics have dismissed James Forman's “Black Manifesto” as a rhetorical failure. Such judgments tend to focus on the prophetic and retributive registers of the speech and fail to account for the full range of its ironic structuration. By examining the complex interchange of prophetic, retributive, and tragic registers through which the “Manifesto” is constructed, we can more fully appreciate how Forman created a space for his auditors to reflect and redirect the vengeful and violent sociohistorical drama seemingly otherwise implied. At the same time, it helps to explain why some black auditors embraced the leadership role Forman directed them to assume, while many whites reviled the supporting role to which they were consigned. Interpreting the speech in terms of the interplay of its multiple ironic registers invites us to focus attention on the ways in which ironic protest rhetoric operates in dialogue, holding both the ironist and the audience accountable for the productivity of their e...

Negotiating Liberalism and Bio-Politics: Stylizing Power in Defense of the Mall Curfew.

Abstract: While Michel Foucault's “technologies of the self” are useful in explaining the convergence of liberalism and bio-politics, they fail to account for the appeal of juridical mechanisms that administer the conventions of bio-political control. A productive site from which to explore this convergence is provided by the “mall curfew,” a bio-political mechanism designed to normalize the shopping experience and discipline the site's youth culture. Public justifications for the mall curfew legitimize and stylize its power by targeting a scene of life rather than individual agents, and by emanating from the private realm of the family.

Mirrors for the Queen: A Letter from Christine de Pizan on the Eve of Civil War

Abstract: As a rhetorical figure, the example is constitutively split between the structural vocations of the Greek paradeigma (emphasizing illumination and belonging) and the Latin exemplum (emphasizing detachment and exclusion). This bifurcation enables the example to function as a strategic resource of ambiguity. Christine de Pizan exercises this ambiguity in her 1405 letter to the Queen of France. In particular, she develops a rhetoric of exemplary figures, the aim of which is to legitimate and effect the Queen's intervention in a hazardous political conflict, without in turn violating established codes of deference. Close inspection of this minor epistolary text demonstrates the utility of the example for purposes of rhetorical prodding, political judgment, and social transformation.

Rogue Waves, Remakes, and Resurrections: Allegorical Displacement and Screen Memory in Poseidon

Abstract: Poseidon, the 2006 remake of the Vietnam-era disaster film The Poseidon Adventure, functions rhetorically as a symptomatic response to the historical trauma(s) of 9/11, revising the narrative of its cinematic predecessor and producing a screen memory that marks the changed cultural and historical context that demanded its repetition in the first place. Operating in an allegorical register, Poseidon displaces traumatic memories of 9/11 and thus contributes to the repetition and rewriting of traumatic history in search of mastery over tragic loss.

Review Essay: Deliberating Rhetoric

Abstract: The question of rhetoric’s role in democracy is as old as both rhetoric and democracy. But two and a half millennia since the question was first posed by the ancient Greeks and almost two and a half centuries after the founding of the American democracy, the question continues to befuddle. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries in regard to the rhetorical skills of Barack Obama. While few questioned Obama’s rhetorical capabilities, not everyone agreed such talents were to be celebrated. In early January 2008, for instance, Hillary Clinton, Obama’s opponent, argued in a press release that it was important for voters to see the difference between talk and action, rhetoric and results, because ‘‘no matter how beautifully presented, words are not action.’’ Karl Rove, the former senior advisor to President George W. Bush, went further in a Wall Street Journal editorial following Clinton’s New Hampshire win when he wrote, Obama’s ‘‘rhetoric, while eloquent and moving at times, has been too often light as air.’’ At the heart of both these criticisms

Go Tell Alcibiades: Tragedy, Comedy, and Rhetoric in Plato's Symposium

Abstract: Plato's Symposium is a significant but neglected part of his elaborate and complex attitude toward rhetoric. Unlike the intellectual discussion of the Gorgias or the unscripted conversation of the Phaedrus, the Symposium stages a feast celebrating and driven by the forces of Eros. A luxuriously stylish performance rather than a rational critique or a bemused apotheosis of rhetoric, the Symposium asks to be read within a performative tradition that emphasizes the artistic enactment of both argument and story as well as the incarnation of utterances intoxicated by wine and erotic urge. Only by fully embracing the festive complexion of the Symposium can one escape the claims of its words and come close to the spirit that inhabits its tragic vision and comic sophistication. At stake in this approach is our understanding of ourselves as actors in and spectators of the drama of life, a drama punctuated by rhetorical ecstasies that underwrite the wish for immortality.

Women's Rhetoric in History: A Process-Oriented Turn and Continued Recovery

Abstract: Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), ix + 290 pp. $49.45 (cloth). Jane E. Simonsen, Making Home Wo...

The Political Economy of Rhetorical Style: Hugh Blair's Response to the Civic-Commercial Dilemma

Abstract: Recent scholarship treats Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) as an effort to endorse either the liberal or the civic political traditions in eighteenth-century Scotland. This essay questions this orthodoxy by reading the Lectures, and in particular Blair's attention to considerations of rhetorical style, against their ideological and economic conditions and with a focus on how he seeks to adapt the civic political tradition of virtues—which today we might call the “bourgeois virtues”—to the emerging conditions of laissez-faire capitalism and the problem of excessive consumption in a growing commercial economy. Blair's appeal to a privatized cultural solution to the problems of economic excess presages similar efforts in contemporary times to negotiate the relationship between rhetoric and political economy under the conditions of late capitalism, and thus warrants renewed interest in his Lectures.