Download or read book Twentieth century American Success Rhetoric written by John D. Ramage and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-help authors like Tom Peters and Stephen Covey, who have dominated best-seller lists over the last two decades, have exercised increasing influence on political, governmental, and educational organizations. By contrast, the topic of American success books-- texts that promise to help readers succeed by retrofitting their identity to meet workplace demands--has been ignored by scholars since the 1980s. John Ramage challenges the neglect of this hugely popular literature and revives a once-lively conversation among eminent critics about the social phenomenon represented in the work of Bruce Barton, Dale Carnegie, and Norman Vincent Peale, among others. Using literary texts from Don Quixote to Catch-22 to gloss the discussion, Ramage utilizes Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory to understand symbolic acts and social issues and brings together earlier commentaries within a new critical framework. He considers the problematic and paradoxical nature of success and examines its meaning in terms of its traditional dialectic partner, happiness. A synopsis of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century forerunners prefaces this analysis in which Ramage links literary code heroes with the activities of twentieth-century business leaders to determine whether, in the search for authenticity, the heroic individual or the corporation is ultimately served. This comprehensive study chronicles the legitimation of the success book genre, enumerates rhetorical strategies used to win over readers, and supplies the historical context that renders each book's message timely. After considering some of the dangers of crossing disciplinary borders, as exemplified by Deborah Tannen's work, Ramage critiques Stanley Fish's theoretical strictures against this practice, finally summoning academic critics to action with a strong call to exert greater influence within the popular marketplace.

Download or read book Rhetoric s Pragmatism written by Steven Mailloux and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over thirty years, Steven Mailloux has championed and advanced the field of rhetorical hermeneutics, a historically and theoretically informed approach to textual interpretation. This volume collects fourteen of his most recent influential essays on the methodology, plus an interview. Following from the proposition that rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, this book examines a diverse range of texts from literature, history, law, religion, and cultural studies. Through four sections, Mailloux explores the theoretical writings of Heidegger, Burke, and Rorty, among others; Jesuit educational treatises; and products of popular culture such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In doing so, he shows how rhetorical perspectives and pragmatist traditions work together as two mutually supportive modes of understanding, and he demonstrates how the combination of rhetoric and interpretation works both in theory and in practice. Theoretically, rhetorical hermeneutics can be understood as a form of neopragmatism. Practically, it focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of written and performed communication. A thought-provoking collection from a preeminent literary critic and rhetorician, Rhetoric’s Pragmatism assesses the practice and value of rhetorical hermeneutics today and the directions in which it might head. Scholars and students of rhetoric and communication studies, critical theory, literature, law, religion, and American studies will find Mailloux’s arguments enlightening and essential.

Download or read book Bodies of Reform written by James B. Salazar and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable “stuff,” has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity. Bodies of Reform reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of “character” in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, James B. Salazar uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. His innovative reading of this archive offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining-and contesting-the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.

Download or read book American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment written by Jason Edward Black and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jason Edward Black examines the ways the US government’s rhetoric and American Indian responses contributed to the policies of Native-US relations throughout the nineteenth century’s removal and allotment eras. Black shows how these discourses together constructed the perception of the US government and of American Indian communities. Such interactions—though certainly not equal—illustrated the hybrid nature of Native-US rhetoric in the nineteenth century. Both governmental, colonizing discourse and indigenous, decolonizing discourse shaped arguments, constructions of identity, and rhetoric in the colonial relationship. American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment demonstrates how American Indians decolonized dominant rhetoric through impeding removal and allotment policies. By turning around the US government’s narrative and inventing their own tactics, American Indian communities helped restyle their own identities as well as the government’s. During the first third of the twentieth century, American Indians lobbied for the successful passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Indian New Deal of 1934, changing the relationship once again. In the end, Native communities were granted increased rhetorical power through decolonization, though the US government retained an undeniable colonial influence through its territorial management of Natives. The Indian Citizenship Act and the Indian New Deal—as the conclusion of this book indicates—are emblematic of the prevalence of the duality of US citizenship that fused American Indians to the nation, yet segregated them on reservations. This duality of inclusion and exclusion grew incrementally and persists now, as a lasting effect of nineteenth-century Native-US rhetorical relations.

Download or read book The Rhetoric of Redemption written by David A. Bobbitt and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007-02-16 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech has become an icon of American public culture, its imagery and words profoundly influencing the civil rights debate. In The Rhetoric of Redemption Bobbitt applies Kenneth Burke's theory of guilt-purification-redemption in a close, critical analysis of the speech, developing and examining the implications of Burke's redemption drama in contemporary public discourse. He studies the impact of the speech over time, arguing that, while King's speech contains an inspirational vision of national redemption, it does so by omitting the real difficulties of overcoming America's racial divisions.

Download or read book Rhetoric Inc written by Timothy Johnson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1914, the Ford Motor Company opened its Motion Picture Laboratory, an in-house operation that produced motion pictures to educate its workforce and promote its products. Just six years later, Ford films had found their way into schools and newsreels, travelogues, and even feature films in theaters across the country. It is estimated that by 1961, the company’s movies had captured an audience of sixty-four million people. This study of Ford’s corporate film program traces its growth and rise in prominence in corporate America. Drawing on nearly three hundred hours of material produced between 1914 and 1954, Timothy Johnson chronicles the history of Ford’s filmmaking campaign and analyzes selected films, visual and narrative techniques, and genres. He shows how what began as a narrow educational initiative grew into a global marketing strategy that presented a vision not just of Ford or corporate culture but of American life more broadly. In these films, Johnson uncovers a powerful rhetoric that Ford used to influence American labor, corporate style, production practices, road building, suburbanization, and consumer culture. The company’s early and continued success led other corporations to adopt similar programs. Persuasive and thoroughly researched, Rhetoric, Inc. documents the role that imagery and messaging played in the formation of the modern American corporation and provides a glimpse into the cultural turn to the economy as a source of entertainment, value, and meaning.

Download or read book The Adman s Dilemma written by Paul Rutherford and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Adman’s Dilemma is a cultural biography that explores the rise and fall of the advertising man as a figure who became effectively a licensed deceiver in the process of governing the lives of American consumers. Apparently this personage was caught up in a contradiction, both compelled to deceive yet supposed to tell the truth. It was this moral condition and its consequences that made the adman so interesting to critics, novelists, and eventually filmmakers. The biography tracks his saga from its origins in the exaggerated doings of P.T. Barnum, the emergence of a new profession in the 1920s, the heyday of the adman’s influence during the post-WW2 era, the later rebranding of the adman as artist, until the apparent demise of the figure, symbolized by the triumph of that consummate huckster, Donald Trump. In The Adman’s Dilemma, author Paul Rutherford explores how people inside and outside the advertising industry have understood the conflict between artifice and authenticity. The book employs a range of fictional and nonfictional sources, including memoirs, novels, movies, TV shows, websites, and museum exhibits to suggest how the adman embodied some of the strange realities of modernity.

Download or read book American Eloquence written by Roderick P. Hart and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes political speech powerful? How does eloquent rhetoric transcend ordinary language? Which stylistic choices allow effective orators to stir emotions and spur action? And in the age of Donald Trump, does political eloquence still matter? This book examines a wide swath of political discourse to shed new light on the meaning and significance of eloquence. Roderick P. Hart, a leading scholar of political communication, develops new ways of measuring persuasiveness and rhetorical power through the use of computer-based methods. He examines one hundred of the most important speeches of the twentieth century, given by presidents and politicians as well as leaders, activists, and cultural figures including Martin Luther King Jr., Lou Gehrig, Mario Savio, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Stokely Carmichael. Deploying the tools of the digital humanities as well as critical rhetorical analysis, Hart considers what distinguishes the linguistic properties of iconic oratory from those of more mundane texts. He argues that eloquence represents the confluence of cultural resonance, personal investment, and poetic imagination, providing empirical metrics for assessing each of these qualities. A quantitative and qualitative exploration of American political speech, this interdisciplinary book offers a powerful argument for why eloquence is essential for a functioning democracy.

Download or read book Economic Injustice and the Rhetoric of the American Dream written by Luke Winslow and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our economic arrangements require a persuasive story that can explain who is rich, who is poor, and why. This story shapes our attitudes toward what is just and unjust; this story dispenses power to some and withholds it from others; and the deeply political and paradoxical nature of this story presents a valuable site of rhetorical inquiry. Economic Injustice and the Rhetoric of the American Dream fills an important scholarly gap by connecting the need to make sense of economic arrangements with the rhetoric of the American Dream. Luke Winslow examines how the rhetoric of the American Dream has emerged as a dominant cultural touchstone in oscillation with a widespread shift to individualistic explanations for economic arrangements, the arrival of neoliberalism, growing levels on inequality, and dismal rates of economic mobility. By developing the tools of rhetorical and ideological criticism this book explores the American Dream in relation to religious, economic, educational, and political institutions ranging from Prosperity Theology to the candidacy and election of Donald Trump. Recommended for scholars in Communication, Economics, Political Science, and Religious Studies.

Download or read book Origins of the Dream written by W. Jason Miller and published by . This book was released on 2016-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Majestic. Grounded in astute interpretations of how speech acts function in history, this book is an exemplary model for future inquiries about the confluence of thought, poetry, and social action."--Jerry Ward Jr., coeditor of The Cambridge History of African American Literature "A vade mecum for those interested in the cultural ingredients, the political values, and the artistic sensibilities that united Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King Jr. in spirit, thought, and outlook. Masterfully conceived, meticulously researched, and gracefully written, this book breaks new ground."--Lewis V. Baldwin, author of There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr. "Archival material is spotlighted in Miller's exploration of the ways Martin Luther King Jr. enlarged the appeal of his rhetoric by using poetry in his speeches. Readers will emerge with a greater appreciation of both King and Langston Hughes."--Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, editor of The Later Simple Stories (The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 8) "Miller's study provides an original, engaging and provocative thesis that explores the hitherto unexplored links between two twentieth century African American icons."--John A. Kirk, editor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement: Controversies and Debates For years, some scholars have privately suspected Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech was connected to Langston Hughes's poetry, and the link between the two was purposefully veiled through careful allusions in King's orations. In Origins of the Dream, W. Jason Miller lifts that veil to demonstrate how Hughes's revolutionary poetry became a measurable inflection in King's voice, and that the influence can be found in more than just the one famous speech. Miller contends that by employing Hughes's metaphors in his speeches, King negotiated a political climate that sought to silence the poet's subversive voice. He argues that by using allusion rather than quotation, King avoided intensifying the threats and accusations against him, while allowing the nation to unconsciously embrace the incendiary ideas behind Hughes's poetry.

Download or read book The Rhetorical Presidency of George H W Bush written by Martin J. Medhurst and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2006-02-15 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For George H. W. Bush, the distinction between campaigning (“politics”) and governing (“principles”) was crucial. Once in office, he abandoned his campaign mode and with it the rhetorical strategies that brought electoral success. Not recognizing the crucial importance of rhetoric to policy formation and implementation, Bush forfeited the resources of the bully pulpit and paid the price of electoral defeat. In this first-ever analysis of Bush’s rhetoric to draw on the archives of the Bush Presidential Library, scholars explore eight major events or topics associated with his presidency: the first Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin wall, the “New World Order,” Bush’s “education presidency,” his environmental stance, the “vision thing,” and the influence of the Religious Right. The volume concludes with a cogent of the 1992 re-election campaign and Bush’s last-gasp use of economic rhetoric.Drawing on the resources of the Bush Presidential Library and interviews with many of Bush’s White House aides, the scholars included in this tightly organized volume ask, How well did President Bush and his administration respond to events, issues, and situations? In the process, they also suggest how a more perceptive embrace of the art of rhetoric might have allowed them to respond more successfully.The Rhetorical Presidency of George H. W. Bush breaks important ground for our understanding of the forty-first president’s time in office and the reasons it ended so quickly.

Download or read book Twentieth Century Roots of Rhetorical Studies written by Jim A. Kuypers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2001-03-30 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kuypers, King, and their contributors explore the conception of rhetoric of eleven key American rhetoricians through analyses of their life's work. Each chapter provides a sense of that scholar's conception of rhetoric, be it through criticism, theory, or teaching. The communication discipline often highlights the work of others outside the discipline; however, it rarely acclaims the work of its own critics, teachers, and theorists. In this collection, the essays explore the innate mode of perception that guided the rhetorical understanding of the early critics. In so doing, this work dispels the myth that the discipline of Speech Communication was spawned from a monolithic and rigid center that came to be called neo-Aristotelianism. Scholars and researchers involved with the history of rhetoric, rhetorical criticism and theory, and American public address uill find this title to be a necessary addition to their collection.

Download or read book American Literature and Rhetoric written by Robin Dissin Aufses and published by Macmillan Higher Education. This book was released on 2021-02-19 with total page 3281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book that’s built for you and your students. Flexible and innovative, American Literature & Rhetoric provides everything you need to teach your course. Combining reading and writing instruction to build essential skills in its four opening chapters and a unique anthology you need to keep students engaged in Chapters 5-10, this book makes it easy to teach chronologically, thematically, or by genre.

Download or read book The Rhetoric of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton written by Colleen Kelley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2001-01-30 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kelley provides an examination of Hillary Rodham Clinton's rhetorical responses to mediated versions of crises in the Clinton Administration. She begins by examining the historical First Lady, and then looks at mediated political realities in general as well as those of the Clinton presidency. Kelley also examines the rhetorical management of political crises and the crises management style of First Ladies, including Florence Harding and Eleanor Roosevelt. The book focuses on the analysis of Hillary Rodham Clinton's rhetorical management of crises in her husband's Administration, including health care, Travelgate, Whitewater, and allegations of sexual misconduct. Kelley's approach is grounded in Kenneth Burke's framework of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation through rhetorical identification. She concludes with speculation regarding both the degree of success of Hillary Clinton's efforts as well as the implications of those efforts to rhetorical and political communication and feminist theory. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers of the presidency and the role of the First Lady, political communication, and feminist studies.

Download or read book Bonfires of the American Dream in American Rhetoric Literature and Film written by Daniel Shaviro and published by . This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How could American social solidarity have so collapsed that we cannot even cooperate in fighting a pandemic? One problem lies in how our values mutate and intersect in an era of runaway high-end inequality and evaporating upward mobility. Under such conditions, the American Dream's seeming to suggest, falsely, that those who succeed economically are "winners," while the rest of us are "losers," puts it in dire conflict with our traditions of democracy and egalitarianism. In Bonfires of the American Dream, through close cultural studies of classic novels and films - Atlas Shrugged, The Great Gatsby, It's a Wonderful Life, and The Wolf of Wall Street - Daniel Shaviro helps to provide a better understanding of what went wrong culturally in America.

Download or read book Rethinking the Rhetorical Presidency written by Jeffrey Friedman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey Tulis argues that the president’s relationship to the public has changed dramatically since the Constitution was enacted: while previously the president avoided any discussions of public policy so as to avoid demagoguery, the president is now expected to go directly to the public, using all the tools of rhetoric to influence public policy. This has effectively created a "second" Constitution that has been layered over, and in part contradicts, the original one. In our volume, scholars from different subfields of political science extend Tulis’s perspective to the judiciary and Congress; locate the origins of the constitutional change in the Progressive Era; highlight the role of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the mass media in transforming the presidency; discuss the nature of demagoguery and whether, in fact, rhetoric is undesirable; and relate the rhetorical presidency to the public’s ignorance of the workings of a government more complex than the Founders imagined. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society.

Download or read book Rhetoric History and Women s Oratorical Education written by David Gold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of rhetoric have long worked to recover women's education in reading and writing, but have only recently begun to explore women's speaking practices, from the parlor to the platform to the varied types of institutions where women learned elocutionary and oratorical skills in preparation for professional and public life. This book fills an important gap in the history of rhetoric and suggests new paths for the way histories may be told in the future, tracing the shifting arc of women's oratorical training as it develops from forms of eighteenth-century rhetoric into institutional and extrainstitutional settings at the end of the nineteenth century and diverges into several distinct streams of community-embodied theory and practice in the twentieth. Treating key rhetors, genres, settings, and movements from the early republic to the present, these essays collectively challenge and complicate many previous claims made about the stability and development of gendered public and private spheres, the decline of oratorical culture and the limits of women's oratorical forms such as elocution and parlor rhetorics, and women's responses to rhetorical constraints on their public speaking. Enriching our understanding of women's oratorical education and practice, this cutting-edge work makes an important contribution to scholarship in rhetoric and communication.