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 2017-05-26 with total page 229 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 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 353 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 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 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 Political Low Roads written by Phillip Martin Carpenter and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the rhetoric of the twentieth century American demagoguery used by four consummate practitioners [Ben Tillman, James Michael Curley, Joe MacCarthy, and Barry Goldwater] and further developed by the political movement, the "New Right." Through its politicians, think tanks, and well financed political action committees, the movement spoke as a unified and collective voice, using precisely the same demagogic rhetorical techniques once exploited only by individual politicians. From publisher description.
Download or read book The Force of Fantasy written by Ernest G. Bormann and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, first published in 1985, Ernest G. Bormann explores mass persuasion in America from 1620 to 1860, examining closely four rhetorical communities: the revivals of 1739-1740, the hot gospel of the postrevolutionary period, the evangelical revival and reform of the 1830s, and the Free Soil and Republican parties. Each community varies greatly, but Bormann asserts that each succeeding community shares a rhetorical vision of restoring the "American Dream" that is essentially a modification of the previous visions. Thus, they form a family of rhetorical visions that constitutes a rhetorical tradition of importance in nineteenth-century American popular culture.
Download or read book The Rhetorical Presidency written by Jeffrey K. Tulis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published by Princeton University Press in 1987. Now with new foreword and a new afterword.
Download or read book My Fellow Americans written by Ian Williams and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 To Become an American written by Leslie A. Hahner and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pledging allegiance, singing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” wearing a flag pin—these are all markers of modern patriotism, emblems that announce the devotion of American citizens. Most of these nationalistic performances were formulized during the early twentieth century and driven to new heights by the panic surrounding national identity during World War I. In To Become an American Leslie A. Hahner argues that, in part, the Americanization movement engendered the transformation of patriotism during this period. Americanization was a massive campaign designed to fashion immigrants into perfect Americans—those who were loyal in word, deed, and heart. The larger outcome of this widespread movement was a dramatic shift in the nation’s understanding of Americanism. Employing a rhetorical lens to analyze the visual and aesthetic practices of Americanization, Hahner contends that Americanization not only tutored students in the practices of citizenship but also created a normative visual metric that modified how Americans would come to understand, interpret, and judge their own patriotism and that of others.
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 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 Reimagining Advocacy written by Elizabeth C. Britt and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Domestic violence accounts for approximately one-fifth of all violent crime in the United States and is among the most difficult issues confronting professionals in the legal and criminal justice systems. In this volume, Elizabeth Britt argues that learning embodied advocacy—a practice that results from an expanded understanding of expertise based on lived experience—and adopting it in legal settings can directly and tangibly help victims of abuse. Focusing on clinical legal education at the Domestic Violence Institute at the Northeastern University School of Law, Britt takes a case-study approach to illuminate how challenging the context, aims, and forms of advocacy traditionally embraced in the U.S. legal system produces better support for victims of domestic violence. She analyzes a wide range of materials and practices, including the pedagogy of law school training programs, interviews with advocates, and narratives written by students in the emergency department, and looks closely at the forms of rhetorical education through which students assimilate advocacy practices. By examining how students learn to listen actively to clients and to recognize that clients have the right and ability to make decisions for themselves, Britt shows that rhetorical education can succeed in producing legal professionals with the inclination and capacity to engage others whose values and experiences diverge from their own. By investigating the deep relationship between legal education and rhetorical education, Reimagining Advocacy calls for conversations and action that will improve advocacy for others, especially for victims of domestic violence seeking assistance from legal professionals.
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 In di visible Dream written by Raymond L. Blanton and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation takes a rhetorical approach in exploring the mythology of the road in American culture, and in particular the road as an encounter with the other. Specifically, I argue for the road as a mythic archetype, developing an ultimate vocabulary of the road as an Upward/Downward Way in an effort to transcend the dialectical tensions inherent in extant discourse of the road as rebellion. I begin by situating the road as psychagogic rhetoric, a leading of the soul, in Plato's Phaedrus, to delineate a fixed and reasoned progression of an ultimate order of the road. Then, I extend these considerations to the road in American culture. From there, I substantiate these claims in two distinct but interrelated case studies, each a demonstration of the Upward/Downward Way in relation to particular periods, places, people, and poetry in twentieth-century American culture. In my first case study, I focus on the archetype in American folk music, attending to the road as a rhetorical encounter with the other in the fieldwork of folklorist Alan Lomax in the Mississippi Delta. In my second case study, I explore the archetype in public discourse, centering on the road as a rhetorical encounter with the other in the civic and sermonic discourse of Martin Luther King Jr. in the American civil rights movement. Throughout this study, I bring elements of rhetoric, myth, and the road in American culture into critical focus, employing John Durham Peters' "hermeneutic principle of retroactive enrichment," I reread aspects of rhetorical history and American culture. Furthermore, I build on ideas in Richard T. Hughes' critical work on myth in America and Kenneth Burke's mythic methodology to substantiate my claims. My ultimate objective is to emphasize the archetypal (Upward) and ethical (Downward) dimensions of an ultimate order of the road as an encounter with the other, with the aim of equipping scholars of rhetoric, media, and culture with a new critical lens for understanding how the road functions rhetorically, mythologically, and poetically in American culture.
Download or read book The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric written by James Arnt Aune and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culminating a decade of conferences that have explored presidential speech, The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric assesses progress and suggests directions for both the practice of presidential speech and its study. In Part One, following an analytic review of the field by Martin Medhurst, contributors address the state of the art in their own areas of expertise. Roderick P. Hart then summarizes their work in the course of his rebuttal of an argument made by political scientist George Edwards: that presidential rhetoric lacks political impact. Part Two of the volume consists of the forward-looking reports of six task forces, comprising more than forty scholars, charged with outlining the likely future course of presidential rhetoric, as well as the major questions scholars should ask about it and the tools at their disposal. The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric will serve as a pivotal work for students and scholars of public discourse and the presidency who seek to understand the shifting landscape of American political leadership.
