Myth and multiple readings in environmental rhetoric: The case of an inconvenient truth

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Volumn 95, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 1-19

  Rosteck, Thomas ^a,b   Frentz, Thomas S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS   (United States)

^b 417 Kimpel Hall ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

Documentary; Environmental rhetoric; Jeremiad; Myth; Polysemy

Indexed keywords

EID: 61449240055     PISSN: 00335630     EISSN: 14795779     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00335630802621086     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1995).
2. See, for instance, Kevin Michael DeLuca, "The Possibilities of Nature in a Postmodern Age: The Rhetorical Tactics of Environmental Justice Groups," Communication Theory 9 (1999): 189-215
3. Kevin Michael DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: Guilford Press, 1999)
4. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, eds., Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)
5. Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown, eds., Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996)
6. John Opie and Norbert Elliot, "Tracking the Elusive Jeremiad: The Rhetorical Character of American Environmental Discourse," in The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our Creation of the Environment, ed. James G. Cantrill and Christine L. Oravec (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 9-37
7. Scott Slovic, "Epistemology and Politics in American Nature Writing: Embedded Rhetoric and Discrete Rhetoric," in Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America, 82-110.
8. Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
9. An Inconvenient Truth, DVD, directed by Davis Guggenheim, Hollywood, CA: Paramount Classics Home Entertainment, 2006.
10. Pat Aufderheide, review of An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, Cineaste 32 (2006): 52.
11. Anthony Breznican, "Al Gore Savors Day in the Sun: New and Old Fans Warm Up to Former VP and His 'Truth,'" USA Today, June 9, 2006, Section E, final edition.
12. Both quoted in Amanda Gefter, "No Climate Crisis? Watch This Movie," review of An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, New Scientist 191 (2006): 51.
13. Amy Taubin, "An Inconvenient Truth," review of An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, Sight & Sound 16 (2006): 56.
14. Richard J. Ellis, American Political Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 171.
15. Opie and Elliot, "Tracking the Elusive Jeremiad," 9-10.
16. "Al Gore's New Mission," America 195 (2006): 4
17. Taubin, "Inconvenient Truth," 56.
18. Bret Schulte, "Saying It in Cinema," review of An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, U.S. News & World Report, June 5, 2006, http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1044009771 &sid =1&fmt =3&clientid=13929&rqt =309&vname =pqd/.
19. A. O. Scott, "Warning of Calamities with a Scholarly Tone," review of An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, New York Times, May 24, 2006.
20. Brian D. Johnson, "Now with the Weather-Al Gore," Maclean's, May 22, 2006, http:// search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct= true&db=aph&an=20881612&site=ehost-live&scope=site/.
21. "Al Gore's New Mission," 4.
22. Jonah Goldberg, "Same Ol Gore," National Review 58 (2006): 8.
23. Other viewers of the film seem to suspect that AIT is intended mostly to rehabilitate the political fortunes of the former senator and vice president-to present once again, as Jonah Goldberg dubs him, "the new savior of the Democratic party." Likewise, John Tierney wonders about the purposes behind "terrifying the public" with "improbable future catastrophes," and notes that Gore carefully "avoids any call to action that would cause immediate discomfort, either to filmgoers or to voters in the 2008 primaries." John Tierney, "Gore Pulls His Punches," review of An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, New York Times, May 23, 2006, Section A, final edition.
24. This theme seems to run through many of the interpretations, and is echoed in the assessment of Eleanor Cliff that Gore is running for president. See Eleanor Clift, "Gore on the Un-Campaign Trail," Newsweek,March 26, 2007 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did= 1239719361&sid=2&fmt=3&cli-entid=13929&rqt=309&vname=pqd/ Goldberg, "Same Ol' Gore," 8
25. John Heilemann, "The Comeback Kid," New York Magazine, May 29, 2006, http://proquest.umi.com/ pqdweb?did=1053640311&sid=3&fmt= 3&clientid=13929&rqt=309&Vvname=pqd/. While it made sense in 2006 to read AIT as a campaign film, by 2008 it had become obvious that Gore was not running for president and that these readings were overzealous.
26. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, Modern Library (New York: Random House, 1954), 1356al2.
27. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)
28. John Corner, "What Can We Say About 'Documentary'?" Media, Culture&Society22 (2000): 681-88.
29. Harlan Jacobson and Paul Arthur, "Movies That Mattered," review of An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, Film Comment 43 (2007): 39.
30. Roy W. Spencer, "Al Gore Offers Global Warming Hysteria and Harmful 'Solutions,'" review of An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, Human Events 62 (2006): 15.
31. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), 30.
32. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett have offered an insightful modification of Campbell's original monomyth. Concentrating on American heroes-both real and fictional-in films and novels, they argue that American heroes do not typically begin their heroic journeys within some social group, but rather come in as solitary loners from the outside, fix whatever is wrong in a community, and then depart again alone. While this is certainly a dominant pattern in the texts Lawrence and Jewett examine, it is not the pattern that unfolds in AIT. That pattern, as we will demonstrate, conforms more closely to Campbell's original monomyth. See Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988),
33. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2002).
34. Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, 51.
35. Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, 108.
36. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979)
37. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey, "Rhetoric of Inquiry," in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 3-18
38. Herbert W. Simons, "The Rhetoric of Inquiry as an Intellectual Movement," in The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, ed. Herbert W. Simons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1-31.
39. John Lyne, "Rhetorics of Inquiry," Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1985): 65-73.
40. Roger Silverstone, "The Agonistic Narratives of Television Science," in Documentary and then Mass Media, ed. John Corner (Baltimore, MD: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1986), 81.
41. Silverstone, "Agonistic Narratives," 82.
42. Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, 193.
43. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 3-9.
44. Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 132-34.
45. Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 23.
46. Opie and Elliot, "Tracking the Elusive Jeremiad," 31.
47. Stephen F. Cotgrove, Catastrophe or Cornucopia: The Environment, Politics, and the Future (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1982), 5.
48. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, "Millennial Ecology: The Apocalyptic Narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming," in Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric inContemporary America, ed. Carl G. Hemdl and Stuart C. Brown (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 41.
49. Leah Ceccarelli, "Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism," Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 410.
50. Ceccarelli, "Polysemy," 409.
51. This is a rather common point of contrast in theory. See, for instance: Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987)
52. Beverly Whitaker Long and Mary Susan Strine, "Reading Intertextually: Multiple Mediations and Critical Practice," Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 467-75
53. Richard Hillman, "The Anxiety of Intertextuality," Semiotica 107 (1995): 355-67.
54. Christine L. Oravec, "To Stand Outside Oneself: The Sublime in the Discourse of Natural Scenery," in The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our Creation of the Environment, ed. James G. Cantrill and Christine L. Oravec (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 58-75.
55. Oravec, "To Stand Outside Oneself," 58.
56. Oravec, "To Stand Outside Oneself," 58.
57. Oravec, "To Stand Outside Oneself," 58.
58. Oravec, "To Stand Outside Oneself," 58-59.
59. Oravec, "To Stand Outside Oneself," 64-65.
60. Oravec, "To Stand Outside Oneself," 65.