In order to discover whether Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's rhetorical perspective has provided a unique ethical perspective of communication, a review of the literature on existing ethical perspectives of communication would be in order. Ronald C. Arnett and Richard L. Johannesen, two contemporary researchers, have provided thorough reviews of…

Oral interpretation allows audiences to make aesthetic, rather than moral, decisions about lesbian literature. To perform lesbian literature, the interpreter should be aware of lesbian literary criticism. Three theories of lesbian criticism form part of a lesbian literary canon: (1) revision (rereading existing texts from a feminist perspective,…

To consider Frederick Douglass as an autobiographer, it is useful to examine each of his three autobiographical texts with a view to drawing some conclusion about their relation to one another, and about the relation of the author to each one. It seems likely that the shifting of Douglass' narrative stance is an index of his intellectual…

Joseph Cyprien Nadal's "Dictionnaire d'Eloquence Sacree" is an outstanding work because of Nadal's thorough treatment of all the elements young speakers should know as they embark on a platform career. The most important of these elements are invention, disposition, style, memory, and delivery. In addition, the book discusses five duties…

In theory, the Chinese Communist press is required to engage in criticism of other institutions and of Party or government bureaucrats through its news coverage and self-criticism of its own mistakes in response to criticism from readers. In practice, Party control of the press prevents any effective criticism or self-criticism. Basically, the…

Black authors have long been telling America about its slave past, although America has apparently not been listening. Frank Webb's novel, "The Garies and Their Friends," was published in the same decade as Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and yet it has never achieved the popularity of Stowe's work, although its characters are…

This paper traces twentieth-century Unitarian Universalism to its nineteenth-century transcendentalist roots by examining the communication patterns and philosophies of its proponents. Advocates of Unitarianism defend their religious/humanistic philosophy in terms of the Constitution's First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, reflecting their…

Since ancient times, the use of metaphor in rhetorical speeches has been a powerful tool for persuasive impact on audiences. Study of 84 important persuasive speeches, from classic to modern, reveals 52 metaphor types. Among these, 11 types account for 60% of all of the examples. These "archetypal" metaphors are used in speeches, not because of…

The proposition advanced by media critics John Fiske and John Hartley, that television provides the experience of "defamiliarization" (the demand that viewers "negotiate" a response to the ideological frameworks that television presents), is considered by the Russian Formalist critics and the structuralists who elaborated and…

The successful oral reading of poetry requires that oral interpreters conduct phenomenological investigations of the first lines of the poems, not merely to make these lines happen properly but to suggest what has preceded the first line. Individual word meanings in the opening lines of a poem establish "structures of intentionality"--the…

The Bible contains a variety of literary genres including drama, tragedy, and epic poetry, and it is an excellent basis for character study. It also contains a certain amount of humor, which should not be overlooked by students of biblical literature. Examples of intentional humor include the second version of the creation, found in the second…

Arguing that scientific facts and insights can be used analogically to clarify literary analysis at specific moments, this paper presents a number of such facts and their analogical relationship to several literary passages. The examples cited relate the first and second laws of thermodynamics to scenes from "King Lear," rigid bodies in motion to…

Sectarian interpretation of presumption is a major problem facing the teacher of the Bible as literature. Students should be made aware of the pitfalls of interpreting the text from a theological point of view, including "over interpretation" or adding details to scripture, a reliance on poetic license, and an unfamiliaritY with basic Biblical…

President Jimmy Carter's televised address on energy, July 15, 1979, illustrates the principle that rhetoric serves as a transformer, taking issues involving incompatible and insatiable demands and converting them to forms amenable to solutions. The address depicted three distinct yet related scenes: (1) the immediate scene of the energy crisis;…

Twenty-six women and 26 men enrolled in a humanities course at Michigan Technological University wrote their initial impressions to short stories by James Joyce, James Baldwin, Doris Lessing, and Virginia Woolf. The names were removed and the journal entries were analyzed in light of these four questions: (1) Do women refer to their personal…