BiblioVault - Books about Public Discourse

Contesting Cultural Rhetorics

Public Discourse and Education, 1890-1900

Margaret J. Marshall

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Contesting Cultural Rhetorics is a groundbreaking and original study that demonstrates how "education" is viewed as a contested term and a set of contested practices in American culture because it is inevitably linked to highly contested, value-laden terms. An examination of the public discourse of education not only reveals the ideologies and conceptions embedded in educative acts and institutions but also provides a means of examining how education itself functions in American culture as a site of contest between ideologies, values, and the constitution of individual and nation. Margaret J. Marshall's analysis employs a range of contemporary theorists from Bakhtin to Foucault and draws on a number of disciplinary perspectives, including law, history, and ethnography, where scholars have been examining discursive practices and where rhetoric is understood to be a means of examining cultural conceptions and embedded ideologies. Through these lenses she examines four influential and popular texts of the 1890s that serve to illuminate current public debates on education: Joseph Mayer Rice's articles in Forum, a well-respected magazine; Matthew Arnold's introduction to a government report; W. E. B. Du Bois's "A Negro Schoolmaster in the New South;" and Jane Addams's "A Function of the Social Settlement." Neither a history of education nor a typical literary analysis of the texts in question, this book considers the rhetorical stance of authors, the constitution of audience and subject, and the use of references and narratives as devices of authority. Taken together, these texts reveal the complicated public discussion of education in the 1890s—a period of transformation in culture, schooling, and the organization of knowledge. Moreover, they reveal the rhetorical structure of many of the questions Americans ask about education today: who should be educated, by whom, for what purposes, using what methods or materials? What of the past should we pass on to the future, and how? Contesting Cultural Rhetorics will be useful to readers interested in the history of education and nineteenth-century popular culture, as well as those involved in current debates on education and public policy.

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The Conundrum of Class

Public Discourse on the Social Order in America

Martin J. Burke

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Martin Burke traces the surprisingly complicated history of the idea of class in America from the forming of a new nation to the heart of the Gilded Age.

Surveying American political, social, and intellectual life from the late 17th to the end of the 19th century, Burke examines in detail the contested discourse about equality—the way Americans thought and wrote about class, class relations, and their meaning in society.

Burke explores a remarkable range of thought to establish the boundaries of class and the language used to describe it in the works of leading political figures, social reformers, and moral philosophers. He traces a shift from class as a legal category of ranks and orders to socio-economic divisions based on occupations and income. Throughout the century, he finds no permanent consensus about the meaning of class in America and instead describes a culture of conflicting ideas and opinions.

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Martin Luther King Jr. and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse

Carolyn Calloway-Thomas

University of Alabama Press, 1993

Critical studies of the range of King’s public discourse as forms of sermonic rhetoric

The nine essays in this volume offer critical studies of the range of King’s public discourse as forms of sermonic rhetoric. They focus on five diverse and relative short examples from King’s body of work: “Death of Evil on the Seashore,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “I Have a Dream,” “A Time to Break Silence,” and “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

Taken collectively, these five works span both the duration of King’s career as a public advocate but also represent the broad scope of his efforts to craft and project a persuasive vision a beloved community that persists through time.

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Reagan and Public Discourse in America

Michael Weiler

University of Alabama Press, 1992

A critical assessment of the impact of the administration of President Ronald Reagan on public discourse in the United States

The authors show that more than any president since John F. Kennedy, Reagan’s influence flowed from his rhetorical practices. And he is remembered as having reversed certain trends and cast the U.S. on a new course. The contributors to this insightful collection of essays show that Reagan’s rhetorical tactics were matters of primary concern to his administration’s chief political strategists.

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Rhetorical Questions

Studies of Public Discourse

Edwin Black

University of Chicago Press, 1992

From classical antiquity through the Renaissance, rhetoric was the prime vehicle of education in the West and the discipline that prepared students for civic life. With a comprehensiveness drawn from this tradition, Edwin Black here probes the incongruities between form and substance that open public discourse to significant interpretation.

Locating rhetorical studies at the confluence of literature and politics, Black focuses on the ideological component of seemingly literary texts and the use of literary devices to advance political advocacy. The essays collected here range in subject matter from nineteenth-century oratory to New York Times editorials to the rhetoric of Richard Nixon. Unifying the collection are the concerns of secrecy and disclosure, identity, opposition, the scope of argument in public persuasion, and the historical mutability of rhetorical forms.

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Voices in the Wilderness

Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric

Patricia Roberts-Miller

University of Alabama Press, 1999

What has gone wrong with discourse and deliberation in the United States? It remains monologic, argues Patricia Roberts-Miller in Voices in the Wilderness, which traces America’s dominant form of argumentation back to its roots in the rhetorical tradition of 17th-century American Puritans. A work of composition theory, rhetorical theory, and cultural criticism, this volume ultimately provides not only new approaches to argumentation and the teaching of rhetoric, composition, and communication but also an original perspective on the current debate over public discourse

Both Jürgen Habermas and Wayne Booth—two of the most influential theorists in the domain of public discourse and good citizenry—argue for an inclusive public deliberation that involves people who are willing to listen to one another, to identify points of agreement and disagreement, and to make good faith attempts to validate any disputed claims. The Puritan voice crying in the wilderness, Roberts-Miller shows, does none of these things. To this individual of conscience engaged in a ceaseless battle of right and wrong against greedy philistines, all inclusion, mediation, and reciprocity are seen as evil, corrupting, and unnecessary. Hence, the voice in the wilderness does not in any real sense participate in public deliberation, only in public pronouncement.

Arguing that our culture’s continuing affection for the ethos of the voice crying in the wilderness is one of our more troubling inheritances from the early American ambivalence to public discourse—including the Puritan denigration of rhetoric—Roberts-Miller contends that the monologic discourse of the Puritans in fact contains within it arguments for dialogism. Thus, the history of rhetoric can provide much richer fields for reimagining discourse than heretofore credited. Roberts-Miller concludes by extending her findings into their practical applications for argumentation in the public sphere and in the composition classroom.

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