Tropes Of Politics

Talk is of central importance to politics of almost every kind—it’s no accident that when the ancient Greeks first attempted to examine politics systematically, they developed the study of rhetoric. In Tropes of Politics, John Nelson applies rhetorical analysis first to political theory, and then to politics in practice. He offers a full and deep critical examination of political science and political theory as fields of study, and then undertakes a series of creative examinations of political rhetoric, including a deconstruction of deliberation and debate by the U.S. Senate prior to the Gulf War. Using the neglected arts of argument refined by the rhetoric of inquiry, Nelson traces how everyday words like consent and debate construct politics in much the same way that poets such as Mamet and Shakespeare construct plays, and he shows how we are remaking our politics even as we speak. Tropes of Politics explores how politicians take stands and political scientists probe representation, how experts become informed even as citizens become authorities, how students actually reinvent government while professors merely model politics, how senators wage war yet keep comity among themselves. The action, Nelson shows, is in the tropes: these figures of speech and images of deed can persuade us to turn from ideologies like liberalism toward spectacles about democracy or movements into environmentalism and feminism. His argument is that inventive attention to tropes can mean better participation in politics. And the argument is in the tropes—evidence itself as sights or citations, governments as machines or men, politics as hardball or softball, deliberations as freedoms or constraints, borders as fringes or friends.

Talk is of central importance to politics of almost every kind—it’s no accident that when the ancient Greeks first attempted to examine politics systematically, they developed the study of rhetoric. In Tropes of Politics, John Nelson applies rhetorical analysis first to political theory, and then to politics in practice. He offers a full and deep critical examination of political science and political theory as fields of study, and then undertakes a series of creative examinations of political rhetoric, including a deconstruction of deliberation and debate by the U.S. Senate prior to the Gulf War. Using the neglected arts of argument refined by the rhetoric of inquiry, Nelson traces how everyday words like consent and debate construct politics in much the same way that poets such as Mamet and Shakespeare construct plays, and he shows how we are remaking our politics even as we speak. Tropes of Politics explores how politicians take stands and political scientists probe representation, how experts become informed even as citizens become authorities, how students actually reinvent government while professors merely model politics, how senators wage war yet keep comity among themselves. The action, Nelson shows, is in the tropes: these figures of speech and images of deed can persuade us to turn from ideologies like liberalism toward spectacles about democracy or movements into environmentalism and feminism. His argument is that inventive attention to tropes can mean better participation in politics. And the argument is in the tropes—evidence itself as sights or citations, governments as machines or men, politics as hardball or softball, deliberations as freedoms or constraints, borders as fringes or friends.

The most original expression of the English literature of the Renaissance is, without a doubt, its dramatic production. Up to 1616, including Shakespeare, English dramatists presented a complex array of plays that are often hard to classify. In this study, by focusing on tropes and rhetoric, new windows of interpretation are opened; some of the plays had been neglected by critics.

This study revaluates the work of the scientist and radical, poet and dramatist and English exile in Germany Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849). While his writing has elicited high praise from poets ranging from Robert Browning through Ezra Pound to John Ashbery, scholars have frequently neglected it on grounds of its purportedly morbid and opaque eccentricity. Countering this scholarly perception, this book deftly relocates Beddoes's poetry, drama and prose at the centre of Anglo-German debates on aesthetics and life science, politics and theatre in an early nineteenth-century European context. Aided by his letters from Germany, the book re-creates the intercultural discursive universe in which Beddoes easily moves from Shakespeare's plays or the aesthetic experiments of Shelley and his circle to Goethe and to topics debated among Heinrich Heine and the Jungdeutschen, from the most advanced contemporary scientific research to the post-Napoleonic politics of the German radical students' organisations, and from Byron, Baillie and London's illegitimate theatre to Schiller's and Tieck's highly charged reflections on male-male friendship. The study combines historicist strategies with theories of performance, performativity, and visuality as it focuses, in particular, on Beddoes's major and defining work, Death's Jest-Book, first completed in 1829 and published posthumously after much revision in 1850. This study shows how Death's Jest Book, as both drama and poetry, devises complex perspectives on scientifically inspired notions of 'life' and history, how it forges a radical vision for post-Napoleonic Europe and how it links this vision to a daring conception of desiring, gendered selves. The book pays close attention to the dialogue Beddoes's writing maintains with Early Modern literature, and it highlights the proto-modernist features that link his work to that of B chner, Grabbe and a European theatre avant-garde. This innovative study of Beddoes's work, cutting across current investigations into politics, gender, and science in intercultural Romantic Studies should be of interest to scholars and students of British Romantic and Victorian studies as well as of German Vorm rz studies, and to students and scholars of drama and theatre as well as Queer studies.

Are you hurt by the politics and mindsets at your church? They are TROPES. A trope [trōp] is "a figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression." It is a recurrent theme which conditions the public to believe it. You hear tropes so often in movies, TV, and music that you may not even notice them. In this book, Dr. Awendela Grantham identifies how ungodly tropes influenced church politics and impacted her identity as a Black Christian woman. She frames her personal story in the context of race relations in America and warns readers about how these deceptive tropes can cause havoc in their lives. Dr. Grantham holds a Ph.D. in French and African American Studies from Yale University. She teaches African American History at North Carolina A & T State University. Her research focuses on how social identities are developed in the context of religious and political movements and on how we can use this information for social activism. She also wrote The Africana Experience: We've Come This Far.

Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain offers a new account of women's engagement in the poetic and political cultures of seventeenth-century England and Scotland, based on poetry that was produced and circulated in manuscript. Katherine Philips is often regarded as the first in a cluster of women writers, including Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn, who were political, secular, literary, print-published, and renowned. Sarah C. E. Ross explores a new corpus of political poetry by women, offering detailed readings of Elizabeth Melville, Anne Southwell, Jane Cavendish, Hester Pulter, and Lucy Hutchinson, and making the compelling case that female political poetics emerge out of social and religious poetic modes and out of manuscript-based authorial practices. Situating each writer in her political and intellectual contexts, from early covenanting Scotland to Restoration England, this volume explores women's political articulation in the devotional lyric, biblical verse paraphrase, occasional verse, elegy, and emblem. For women, excluded from the public-political sphere, these rhetorically-modest genres and the figural language of poetry offered vital modes of political expression; and women of diverse affiliations use religious and social poetics, the tropes of family and household, and the genres of occasionality that proliferated in manuscript culture to imagine the state. Attending also to the transmission and reception of women's poetry in networks of varying reach, Sarah C. E. Ross reveals continuities and evolutions in women's relationship to politics and poetry, and identifies a female tradition of politicised poetry in manuscript spanning the decades before, during, and after the Civil Wars.

Photographic stills of women, appearing in both press coverage and relief campaigns, have long been central to the documentation of war and civil conflict. Images of non-Western women, in particular, regularly function as symbols of the misery and hopelessness of the oppressed. Featured on the front pages of newspapers and in NGO reports, they inform public understandings of war and peace, victims and perpetrators, but within a discourse that often obscures social and political subjectivities. Uniquely, this book deconstructs – in a systematic, gender-sensitive way – the repetitive circulation of certain images of war, conflict and state violence, in order to scrutinize the role of photographic tropes in the globalized visual sphere. Zarzycka builds on feminist theories of representations of war to explore how the concepts of femininity and war secure each other’s intelligibility in photographic practices. This book examines the complex connections between photographic tropes and the individuals and communities they represent, in order to rethink the medium of photography as a discursive and political practice. This book interrogates both the structure and transmission of contemporary encounters with war, violence, and conflict. It will appeal to advanced students and scholars of gender studies, visual studies, media studies, photography theory, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and trauma and memory studies.

"What are the relationships among religion, politics, and narratives? What makes prophetic political narratives congenial or hostile to democratic political life? David S. Gutterman explores the prophetic politics of four twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Christian social movements: the Reverend Billy Sunday and his vision of "muscular Christianity"; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement; the conservative Christian male organization Promise Keepers; and the progressive antipoverty organization Call to Renewal." "Gutterman develops a theory based on the work of Hannah Arendt and others and employs this framework to analyze expressions of the prophetic impulse in the political narrative of the United States. In the process, he examines issues about the tense and intricate relationship between religion and politics."--Jacket.