Journal ArticleDOI
Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse
TLDR
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...read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Agency: Promiscuous and Protean
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that agency is communal and participatory, hence, both constituted and constrained by externals that are material and symbolic; it emerges in artistry or craft; it is effected through form; and it is inherently protean, ambiguous, open to reversal.
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The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media
TL;DR: From wikis to blogs, new participatory forms of web-based communication are increasingly common ways for institutions and individuals to communicate as mentioned in this paper, and the content these forms produce incorporates elements of both institutional and non-institutional discourse.
Journal ArticleDOI
Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and Tensions
TL;DR: The authors synthesize these efforts to name a methodological approach, rhetorical field methods, for analyzing everyday rhetorical experience and articulate the commitments and concerns that motivate this approach, thus creating a focus for debate about in situ rhetorical study.
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Critical-Rhetorical Ethnography: Rethinking the Place and Process of Rhetoric
TL;DR: The authors propose a critical-rhetorical ethnography as a method for exploring such discourses in the field of argumentation, using the concepts of invention, kairos, and phronesis.
Journal ArticleDOI
Consciousness-Raising as Collective Rhetoric: The Articulation of Experience in the Redstockings' Abortion Speak-Out of 1969.
TL;DR: In this paper, a theory of collective rhetoric derived from a case study of a central rhetorical event of the second wave of feminism, the Redstockings’ 1969 abortion speak-out, is presented.
References
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Book
I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr
TL;DR: This book discusses Martin Luther King, Jr.'s work as well as other aspects of his life and works, including his response to the Vietnam War, and its consequences.
Book
The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South
TL;DR: O'Brien as mentioned in this paper argues that the Columbia riots are emblematic of a nationwide shift during the 1940s from mob violence against African Americans to increased confrontations between blacks and the police and courts, revealing the roots of black distrust and conflict with the criminal justice system.
Journal ArticleDOI
Journalism, publicity and the lost art of argument
TL;DR: Lasch as discussed by the authors discusses the lost art of argument in the context of journalism, publicity, and argumentation in the media and argues that it can be traced back to the early 1990s.
Journal ArticleDOI
Figures for new frontiers, from Davy Crockett to cyberspace gurus
TL;DR: The authors situates figures of speech and culture between the sublime and the ridiculous, pious awe and impious ridicule, and critiques the representative attitudes they cultivate for publics, arguing that the fundamental characteristic of a democratic aesthetic as it has been historically realized and imagined, and of which Davy Crockett is an intriguing representative, may be its figural hybridizing of these two rhetorics, sublim...