Rhetorics of Democracy in the Americas

Rhetorics of Democracy in the Americas PDF Author: Adriana Angel
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271089482
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Democracy is venerated in US political culture, in part because it is our democracy. As a result, we assume that the government and institutions of the United States represent the true and right form of democracy, needed by all. This volume challenges this commonplace belief by putting US politics in the context of the Americas more broadly. Seeking to cultivate conversations among and between the hemispheres, this collection examines local political rhetorics across the Americas. The contributors—scholars of communication from both North and South America—recognize democratic ideals as irreducible to a single national perspective and reflect on the ways social minorities in the Western Hemisphere engage in unique political discourses. The essays consider current rhetorics in the United States on American exceptionalism, immigration, citizenship, and land rights alongside current cultural and political events in Latin America, such as corruption in Guatemala, women’s activism in Ciudad Juárez, representation in Venezuela, and media bias in Brazil. Through a survey of these rhetorics, this volume provides a broad analysis of democracy. It highlights institutional and cultural differences in the Americas and presents a hemispheric democracy that is both more pluralistic and more agonistic than what is believed about the system in the United States. In addition to the editors, the contributors include José Cortez, Linsay M. Cramer, Pamela Flores, Alberto González, Amy N. Heuman, Christa J. Olson, Carlos Piovezani, Clara Eugenia Rojas Blanco, Abraham Romney, René Agustín de los Santos, and Alejandra Vitale.

Rhetorics of Democracy in the Americas

Rhetorics of Democracy in the Americas PDF Author: Adriana Angel
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271089482
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
Democracy is venerated in US political culture, in part because it is our democracy. As a result, we assume that the government and institutions of the United States represent the true and right form of democracy, needed by all. This volume challenges this commonplace belief by putting US politics in the context of the Americas more broadly. Seeking to cultivate conversations among and between the hemispheres, this collection examines local political rhetorics across the Americas. The contributors—scholars of communication from both North and South America—recognize democratic ideals as irreducible to a single national perspective and reflect on the ways social minorities in the Western Hemisphere engage in unique political discourses. The essays consider current rhetorics in the United States on American exceptionalism, immigration, citizenship, and land rights alongside current cultural and political events in Latin America, such as corruption in Guatemala, women’s activism in Ciudad Juárez, representation in Venezuela, and media bias in Brazil. Through a survey of these rhetorics, this volume provides a broad analysis of democracy. It highlights institutional and cultural differences in the Americas and presents a hemispheric democracy that is both more pluralistic and more agonistic than what is believed about the system in the United States. In addition to the editors, the contributors include José Cortez, Linsay M. Cramer, Pamela Flores, Alberto González, Amy N. Heuman, Christa J. Olson, Carlos Piovezani, Clara Eugenia Rojas Blanco, Abraham Romney, René Agustín de los Santos, and Alejandra Vitale.

Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric

Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric PDF Author: Robert Danisch
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570036903
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric, Robert Danisch examines the search by America's first generation of pragmatists for a unique set of rhetorics that would serve the needs of a developing democracy. Digging deep into pragmatism's historical development, Danisch sheds light on its association with an alternative but significant and often overlooked tradition. He draws parallels between the rhetorics of such American pragmatists as John Dewey and Jane Addams and those of the ancient Greek tradition. Danisch contends that, while building upon a classical foundation, pragmatism sought to determine rhetorical responses to contemporary irresolutions. rhetoric, including pragmatism's rejection of philosophy with its traditional assumptions and practices. Grounding his argument on an

The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic

The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic PDF Author: James L. Kastely
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022627876X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Plato isn’t exactly thought of as a champion of democracy, and perhaps even less as an important rhetorical theorist. In this book, James L. Kastely recasts Plato in just these lights, offering a vivid new reading of one of Plato’s most important works: the Republic. At heart, Kastely demonstrates, the Republic is a democratic epic poem and pioneering work in rhetorical theory. Examining issues of justice, communication, persuasion, and audience, he uncovers a seedbed of theoretical ideas that resonate all the way up to our contemporary democratic practices. As Kastely shows, the Republic begins with two interrelated crises: one rhetorical, one philosophical. In the first, democracy is defended by a discourse of justice, but no one can take this discourse seriously because no one can see—in a world where the powerful dominate the weak—how justice is a value in itself. That value must be found philosophically, but philosophy, as Plato and Socrates understand it, can reach only the very few. In order to reach its larger political audience, it must become rhetoric; it must become a persuasive part of the larger culture—which, at that time, meant epic poetry. Tracing how Plato and Socrates formulate this transformation in the Republic, Kastely isolates a crucial theory of persuasion that is central to how we talk together about justice and organize ourselves according to democratic principles.

Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy

Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy PDF Author: Gae Lyn Henderson
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809335077
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
The study of propaganda’s uses in modern democracy highlights important theoretical questions about normative rhetorical practices. Is rhetoric ethically neutral? Is propaganda? How can facticity, accuracy, and truth be determined? Do any circumstances justify misrepresentation? Edited by Gae Lyn Henderson and M. J. Braun, Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy: History, Theory, Analysis advances our understanding of propaganda and rhetoric. Essays focus on historical figures—Edward Bernays, Jane Addams, Kenneth Burke, and Elizabeth Bowen—examining the development of the theory of propaganda during the rise of industrialism and the later changes of a mass-mediated society. Modeling a variety of approaches, case studies in the book consider contemporary propaganda and analyze the means and methods of propaganda production and distribution, including broadcast news, rumor production and globalized multimedia, political party manifestos, and university public relations. Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy offers new perspectives on the history of propaganda, explores how it has evolved during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and advances a much more nuanced understanding of what it means to call discourse propaganda.

Taming Democracy

Taming Democracy PDF Author: Harvey Yunis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501711377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
How does one speak to a large, diverse mass of ordinary, sovereign citizens and persuade them to render wise decisions? For Thucydides, Plato, and Demosthenes, who observed classical Athenian democracy in action, this was an urgent question. Harvey Yunis looks at how these three—historian, philosopher, politician respectively—explored the instructive potential of political rhetoric as a means of "taming democracy," Plato's metaphor for controlling the fractious demos through language. Yunis offers new insights into the ideas of the three thinkers: Thucydides' bipolar model of Periclean versus demagogic rhetoric; Plato's engagement with political rhetoric in the Gorgias, the Phaedrus, and the Laws; and Demosthenes' attempt both to instruct and to persuade his political audience. Yunis illuminates both the concrete historical problem of political deliberation in Athens and the intellectual and literary responses that the problem evoked. Few, if any, other books on classical Athens afford such a combination of perspectives from history, drama, philosophy, and politics. Writing with unusual clarity and cogency, Yunis translates all texts and explains the relevant issues. His book can profitably be read by anyone concerned with the issues at the heart of classical and contemporary democracy.

The Language of Democracy

The Language of Democracy PDF Author: Andrew Whitmore Robertson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813923444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Tracing the history of political rhetoric in nineteenth-century America and Britain, Andrew W. Robertson shows how modern election campaigning was born. Robertson discusses early political cartoons and electioneering speeches as he examines the role of each nation's press in assimilating masses of new voters into the political system. Even a decade after the American Revolution, the authors shows, British and American political culture had much in common. On both sides of the Atlantic, electioneering in the 1790s was confined mostly to male elites, and published speeches shared a characteristically Neoclassical rhetoric. As voting rights were expanded, however, politicians sought a more effective medium and style for communicating with less-educated audiences. Comparing changes in the modes of in the two countries, Robertson reconstructs the transformation of campaign rhetoric into forms that incorporated the oral culture of the stump speech as well as elite print culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, the press had become the primary medium for initiating, persuading, and sustaining loyal partisan audiences. In Britain and America, millions of men participated in a democratic political culture that spoke their language, played to their prejudices, and courted their approval. Today's readers concerned with broadening political discourse to reach a more diverse audience will find rich and intriguing parallels in Robertson's account.

Deliberative Acts

Deliberative Acts PDF Author: Arabella Lyon
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271069945
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
The twenty-first century is characterized by the global circulation of cultures, norms, representations, discourses, and human rights claims; the arising conflicts require innovative understandings of decision making. Deliberative Acts develops a new, cogent theory of performative deliberation. Rather than conceiving deliberation within the familiar frameworks of persuasion, identification, or procedural democracy, it privileges speech acts and bodily enactments that constitute deliberation itself, reorienting deliberative theory toward the initiating moment of recognition, a moment in which interlocutors are positioned in relationship to each other and so may begin to construct a new lifeworld. By approaching human rights not as norms or laws, but as deliberative acts, Lyon conceives rights as relationships among people and as ongoing political and historical projects developing communal norms through global and cross-cultural interactions.

Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens

Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens PDF Author: Josiah Ober
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400820510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
This book asks an important question often ignored by ancient historians and political scientists alike: Why did Athenian democracy work as well and for as long as it did? Josiah Ober seeks the answer by analyzing the sociology of Athenian politics and the nature of communication between elite and nonelite citizens. After a preliminary survey of the development of the Athenian "constitution," he focuses on the role of political and legal rhetoric. As jurymen and Assemblymen, the citizen masses of Athens retained important powers, and elite Athenian politicians and litigants needed to address these large bodies of ordinary citizens in terms understandable and acceptable to the audience. This book probes the social strategies behind the rhetorical tactics employed by elite speakers. A close reading of the speeches exposes both egalitarian and elitist elements in Athenian popular ideology. Ober demonstrates that the vocabulary of public speech constituted a democratic discourse that allowed the Athenians to resolve contradictions between the ideal of political equality and the reality of social inequality. His radical reevaluation of leadership and political power in classical Athens restores key elements of the social and ideological context of the first western democracy.

Talking Democracy

Talking Democracy PDF Author: Benedetto Fontana
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046471
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
While emphasising discursive and historical dimensions of democracy, the resources available in the history of rhetorical theory and practice tend to be ignored. This book aims to resurrect this history and show how attention to rhetoric can help lead to a better understanding of the strengths and limitations of theories of deliberative democracy.

Rhetoric & Democracy

Rhetoric & Democracy PDF Author: Todd F. McDorman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
A contemporary re-examination of the role of rhetoric in a democracy.