Rhetoric As Currency

Hoover, the president of economic depression; Roosevelt the president of recovery--the public images of these two men are so firmly fixed that they offer shorthand ways to talk about the era we know as the Great Depression. Yet their views on economic policy for taking the country out of its greatest economic calamity were not so different as is often supposed. Indeed, the famed journalist Walter Lippmann once claimed that Roosevelt's legislative measures represented "a continuous evolution of the Hoover measures." Moreover, both Hoover and Roosevelt shared a Keynesian conviction that public confidence was vital to recovery. They differed markedly, of course, in their ability to restore that confidence. Roosevelt's advantage lay not just in his position in the changing of the guard. He employed a skilled staff of speech writers, and he had the negative example of Hoover before him from which to plot rhetorical strategies that would be more effective. In Rhetoric as Currency, Houck uses the historical context of the Great Depression to explore the relationship of rhetoric to the economy and specifically economic recovery. He closely analyzes Hoover's rhetorical corpus from March 4, 1929, through March 3, 1933, and Roosevelt's from January 3, 1930, through June 16, 1933. This longitudinal study allows him to understand rhetoric as a process rather than a series of isolated, discrete products. Houck first examines Hoover's presidential rhetoric, tracing its paradoxes and the radical shift that occurred in the final year of his administration. The Depression, in his rhetoric, was a foe to be vanquished by an optimistic Christian and civic faith, not federal legislation. Once he determined that federal intervention was indeed required, he could not return to the dais; rather, he relied on an antagonistic press to carry his message of confidence. Abdicating the rhetorical pulpit, he left it in the hands of those opposed to him. Houck then studies the economic rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt as governor, candidate, president-elect, and finally president. He traces the key similarities and differences in Roosevelt's economic rhetoric with particular attention to an embodied economics, wherein recovery was premised less on mental optimism than a physical, active confidence.

"This book examines and establishes the importance of one aspect of popular political arguments - rhetorical features that draw upon tradition as taken-for-granted values, judgments, and calculations. It illustrates how popular political arguments draw upon this "rhetoric of right," unique to each political community, to establish the "correctness" or "rightness" of a policy proposal. It then uses that illustration to argue first that tradition in political arguments is not only present, but important; second, that tradition operates through time in a contextual rather than evolutionary manner, and third, that political theorists must take seriously the presence of tradition in political arguments in both its substance and its formal aspects." "The book is based upon a study of political arguments in the Indian religious/political movement that grew up around the Indian mystic Aurobindo Ghose and his collaborator Mirra Richard."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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.

Rhetoric in Popular Culture, Fifth Edition, shows readers how to apply growing and cutting-edge methods of critical studies to a full spectrum of contemporary issues seen in daily life. Exploring a wide range of mass media including current movies, magazines, advertisements, social networking sites, music videos, and television shows, Barry Brummett uses critical analysis to apply key rhetorical concepts to a variety of exciting examples drawn from popular culture. Readers are guided from theory to practice in an easy-to-understand manner, providing them with a foundational understanding of the definition and history of rhetoric as well as new approaches to the rhetorical tradition. Ideal for courses in rhetorical criticism, the highly anticipated Fifth Edition includes new critical essays and case studies that demonstrate for readers how the critical methods discussed can be used to study the hidden rhetoric of popular culture.

As the transition from socialism to a market economy gathered speed in the early 1990s, many people proclaimed the final success of capitalism as a practice and neoliberal economics as its accompanying science. But with the uneven achievements of the “transition”—the deepening problems of “development,” persistent unemployment, the widening of the wealth gap, and expressions of resistance—the discipline of economics is no longer seen as a mirror of reality or as a unified science. How should we understand economics and, more broadly, the organization and disorganization of material life? In this book, international scholars from anthropology and economics adopt a rhetorical perspective in order to make sense of material life and the theories about it. Re-examining central problems in the two fields and using ethnographic and historical examples, they explore the intersections between these disciplines, contrast their methods and epistemologies, and show how a rhetorical approach offers a new mode of analysis while drawing on established contributions.

The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies surveys the latest advances in rhetorical scholarship, synthesizing theories and practices across major areas of study in the field and pointing the way for future studies. Edited by Andrea A. Lunsford and Associate Editors Kirt H. Wilson and Rosa A. Eberly, the Handbook aims to introduce a new generation of students to rhetorical study and provide a deeply informed and ready resource for scholars currently working in the field.

While it has long been understood that the circulation of discourse, bodies, artifacts, and ideas plays an important constitutive force in our cultures and communities, circulation, as a concept and a phenomenon, has been underexamined in studies of rhetoric and writing. In an effort to give circulation its rhetorical due, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric introduces a wide range of studies that foreground circulation in both theory and practice. Contributors to the volume specifically explore the connections between circulation and public rhetorics, urban studies, feminist rhetorics, digital communication, new materialism, and digital research. Circulation is a cultural-rhetorical process that impacts various ecologies, communities, and subjectivities in an ever-increasing globally networked environment. As made evident in this collection, circulation occurs in all forms of discursive production, from academic arguments to neoliberal policies to graffiti to tweets and bitcoins. Even in the case of tombstones, borrowed text achieves only partial stability before it is recirculated and transformed again. This communicative process is even more evident in the digital realm, the underlying infrastructures of which we have yet to fully understand. As public spaces become more and more saturated with circulating texts and images and as networked relations come to the center of rhetorical focus, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric will be a vital interdisciplinary resource for approaching the contemporary dynamics of rhetoric and writing. Contributors: Aaron Beveridge, Casey Boyle, Jim Brown, Naomi Clark, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Rebecca Dingo, Sidney I. Dobrin, Jay Dolmage, Dustin Edwards, Jessica Enoch, Tarez Samra Graban, Byron Hawk, Gerald Jackson, Gesa E. Kirsch, Heather Lang, Sean Morey, Jenny Rice, Thomas Rickert, Jim Ridolfo, Nathaniel A. Rivers, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Michele Simmons, Dale M. Smith, Patricia Sullivan, John Tinnell, Kathleen Blake Yancey