This article presents a discourse analysis of President Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union Address. Fredric Jameson's concepts of cognitive mapping, cultural revolution, and the unconscious are employed to examine the president's vision of educational and economic transformation. Ultimately, it is argued this vision evokes a world in which…

Parody and related forms of political humor are essential resources for sustaining democratic public culture. They do so by exposing the limits of public speech, transforming discursive demands into virtual images, setting those images before a carnivalesque audience, and celebrating social leveling while decentering all discourses within the…

For generations, critics have dismissed James Forman's "Black Manifesto" as a rhetorical failure. Such judgments tend to focus on the prophetic and retributive registers of the speech and fail to account for the full range of its ironic structuration. By examining the complex interchange of prophetic, retributive, and tragic registers through…