Political argumentation and the composite audience: A case study

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Volumn 85, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 55-

  Myers, Frank ^a  

^a STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Composite audience; Great Britain; Palestine; Political argumentation; Political leadership

Indexed keywords

EID: 0007597433     PISSN: 00335630     EISSN: 14795779     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00335639909384241     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. James E. Porter, Audience and Rhetoric: An Archeological Composition of the Discourse Community (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992) contains an extended discussion of the place of the audience as a concept in the literature of rhetoric from classical times to today.
2. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford UP, 1991) Book 2, Chapters 12-17, 164-72
3. Forbes Hill, "Reply to Professor Campbell," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 58 (December 1972), 451-60
4. James R. Andrews, The Practice of Rhetorical Criticism (New York: Macmillan, 1983) at 123, contains a useful discussion of Aristotle's conception of the audience, as does
5. James L. Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse: The Aims of Discourse (New York: Norton, 1971) 241-5. That awareness of the problems of adapting speech to diverse audiences dates to ancient times is evident in Cicero's complaint that Cato sometimes failed in this regard by speaking "in the Senate as though he were living in Plato's Republic instead of Romulus' cesspool
6. Cicero, Cicero's Letters to Atticus, ed. D.R. Shackleton Bailey, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1965) 199. Nevertheless, Burke notes diat, "both Aristotle and Cicero consider audiences purely as something given
7. Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Braziller, 1955)
8. Karl R Wallace, "Booker T. Washington," A History and Criticism of American Public Address, ed. William Norwood Brigance, Vol. 1 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1960) 410 and 416-7.
9. Nixon's use of this strategy in an important speech on Vietnam is analyzed in Forbes Hill, "Conventional Wisdom-Traditional Form—the President's Message of November 3, 1969", Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (December 1972) 373-86, rpt. in Andrews, The Practice of Rhetorical Criticism 105-18.
10. Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press) 31.
11. G.P. Mohrmann and Michael Leff, "Lincoln at Cooper Union: A Rationale for Neoclassical Criticism," Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (December 1974) 459-67, rpt. in Andrews, 168-77.
12. Edward J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modem Student. Second ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1971) 356-61.
13. For discussion of divided ethos, see Marshall W. Alcorn Jr. "Self-Structure as a Rhetorical Device: Modern Ethos and the Divisiveness of the Self," Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory, eds. James Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin (Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1994) 3-35
14. C.R. Smith, "Richard Nixon's 1968 Acceptance Speech as Model of Dual Audience Adaptation," Today's Speech 19 (fall 1971) 19. For a parallel analysis of a speech to a national political convention
15. W.N. Thompson, "Barbara Jordan's Keynote Address: Fulfilling Dual and Conflicting Purposes," Central States Speech Journal 30 (fall 1979) 272-77.
16. Robert L. Scott, "Black Power Bends Martin Luther King," The Rhetoric of Black Power, eds. Robert L. Scott and Wayne Brockriede, (New York: Harper and Row, 1969) 166-177.
17. William L. Benoit and J. Michael D' Agostine, " 'The Case of the Midnight Judges' and Multiple Audience Discourse: Chief Justice Marshall and Marbury V. Madison," Southern Communication Journal 59:2 (Winter 1994) 89-96.
18. Edwin Black, Rhetorical Questions: Studies of Public Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 14-16.
19. This classification is heavily dependent on the taxonomy of strategies of self-presentation developed in E.E. Jones and Thane Pittman, "Toward a General Theory of Self-Presentation," Psychological Perspectives on the Self ed. Jerry Suls (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum 1982) Vol. I, 231-62.
20. Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) 100. Compare Barthes S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) 22.
21. An explanation of the concept of codes along with a (somewhat idiosyncratic) classification and exemplary analysis is found in Barthes (1974), as well as in Roland Barthes, "Textual Analysis of Poe's 'Valdemar,'" Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) 133-61.
22. Great Britain, House of Commons Debales, Vol. 415, Nov. 13, 1945, cols. 1927-1932.
23. Michael J. Cohen, Palestine: Retreat from the Mandate-The Making of British Policy, 1936-45 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978).
24. Conflict was developing within the British Government, however, over the necessity of the Middle East to British Security. See Frank Myers, "Conscription and the Politics of Military Strategy in the Attlee Government," Journal of Strategic Studies 7:1 (March 1984) 55-73
25. Roger Louis. Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1947-45 (New York: Oxford UP, 1978) 556-7
26. Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982) 596-7.
27. Michael J. Cohen, "The Genesis of the Anglo-American Committee on Palestine, November 1945: A Case Study in the Assertion of American Hegemony," Historical Journal 22:1 (January 1979) 185-207.
28. V.L. Allen, Trade Union Leadership: Based on a Study of Arthur Deakin (London: Longmans, 1957) 76-90, for a discussion of Bevin's leadership characteristics.
29. Robert Blake observes in his biography of Disraeli, that political leaders as a group tend to suffer from the "common malady of politicians, which only politicians can explain, the determination to claim that they had never yielded to circumstances and had been actuated by consistent policy throughout." Robert Blake, Disraeli (Garden City, NY; Anchor, 1968) 456.
30. Fritz Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1982) is the classic source on the study of attributions. More recent research is reported
31. Alice H. Eagly and Shelly Chaiken, The Psychology of Attitudes (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993) 351-88.
32. H.P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation", Syntax and Semantics, Volume III: Pragmatics, eds. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (New York: Academic Press, 1975) 46-47.
33. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 231-33. The utility of Perelman's framework for analyzing political argumentation is exemplified in Barbara Warnick, "Argument Schemes and the Construction of Social Reality: John F. Kennedy's Address to the Houston Ministerial Association," Communication Quarterly 44:2 (spring 1996) 183-96.
34. Alan Bullock, The Life and times of Ernest Bevin, Volume One: Trade Union Leader, 1881-1940 (London: Heinemann, 1960) 133-42, and Allen, Chapter Five.
35. Geoffrey Marshall, Constitutional Conventions: The Rules and Forms of Political Accountability (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) 54-61
36. C. Herrenium, trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1954) 163-85.
37. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961) 67-86.
38. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca define presence as the "displaying of certain elements on which the speaker wishes to center attention in order that they may occupy the foreground of the hearer's consciousness" (142). For their full discussion of the topic see 115-20. The concept is discussed in Louise A. Karon, "Presence in the New Rhetoric," The New Rhetoric of Chaim Perelman: Statement and Response, ed. Ray D. Dearin (Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 1989) 163-78.
39. Harry Sacher, Israel: The Establishment of a State (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1952) 49-50
40. Joseph Jeremiah Zasloff, Great Britain and Palestine: A Study of the Problem Before the United Nations (Geneva: Droz, 1952) 31-32, describes the protest strike and even rioting by Jews in Palestine that followed the speech. Much of the negative reaction amongjews was due to statements made by Bevin in his news conference of November 14, 1945 and not part of this study. Bevin's remarks in the news conference were rather casual and much less carefully constructed for ingratiation with the composite audience than were those of the speech on the previous day. See note 29.
41. K. Muir, The Bully Pulpit: The Presidential Leadership of Ronald Reagan (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1992)
42. Kurt W. Ritter and David Henry, Ronald Reagan: The Great Communicator (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992)
43. Michael Weiler and W. Barnett Pearce, eds., Reagan and Public Discourse in America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992).
44. President William Clinton, "Remarks By the President on Affirmative Action," The Rotunda, National Archives, July 19, 1995, Office of the Press Secretary, The White House.
45. Elizabeth Drew, Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) 286 and 289-96.
46. Sidney G. Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Action and Politics (New York: Cambridge, 1994) 170-86
47. Frank Myers, "Civil Disobedience and Organizational Change: The British Committee of 100," Political Science Quarterly 86:1 (March 1971) 92-112
48. Anthony Oberschall, Social Conflict and Social Movements (Englewood Cuffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973) 146-183 and 284-323
49. Charles J. Stewart, "The Evolution of a Revolution: Stokely Carmichael and the Rhetoric of Black Power," The Quarterly Journal of Speech 83:4 (November 1997) 429-48.