Compares the scientific papers produced by two research teams during the AIDS virus hunt. Investigates the "fine line between a bold, explicit rhetoric that may convince as well as offend and a bald, reserved rhetoric that may actually conceal important implications." Demonstrates that going too far across the line in either direction…

In this article, the authors deal with the question whether the concept of "Bildung" or "cultivation/edification" is still a concept which one can use to analyse and criticise actual developments in the field of education (both in thought/discourse and in action/technique) which are themselves related to broader social transformations often…

With the rise of poststructuralist critiques of the autonomous subject, attention has shifted from the nature of "intentional persuasion" to the constitutive nature of discourse. Although this turn has led to valuable new insights into the nature of rhetoric, it also threatens to discount one of the most vital contributions of the rhetorical…

Inspired by poststructuralist insights and the critical literature on the topic of school-based sexuality education, this paper is derived from a close examination of the Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) resource materials devised for teachers involved in delivering the programme in Irish schools. It seeks critically to uncover how…

The primary intent of this paper is to provide an ideological critique of one instance of "union talk," which the paper takes to be representative of organized labor discourse at large. To reach this goal, the question of the need for and value of unions is specifically addressed in the paper, and a review of the studies existing within…

Developing a theme drawn from speculative writing of the nineteenth century--that technology, like biological species, undergoes a process of evolution--this paper explores the thesis that if technology divides from its human creators and perfects itself until it gains the capacity for self replication, it cannot return to its creator. Using…

Sentence-by-sentence analysis of factual or propositional cohesion in the first 29 lines of a Swedish children's story finds several sources of coherence that contribute to its cohesion. First, the text receives much coherence from its description of a single event, a situation where happenings are normal and expected. Second, a rather primitive…

Traditionally, the study of public address has meant the study of great speakers, focusing on individual speech texts, or the speaking careers of individual orators. So dominant was this traditional study of public address that, in its halcyon decades of the l930s, 1940s, and 1950s, it all but eliminated other approaches to rhetorical criticism.…

A mythic interpretive framework can explain how the use of an uncontested term--a word which "seems to invite a contest, but which apparently is not so regarded in its own context"--is legitimated and perpetuated. By examining John C. Calhoun's nullification rhetoric as a case study of political myth (specifically his "Disquisition…

The Know-Nothing party of the 1850s was the first nativist party in American politics to gain importance and serves as an exemplar of how cultural nativism may be captured and turned toward political goals. The resurgence of nativist sentiment in the Know-Nothing era provides an excellent example of a rhetorical situation which seriously…

The concepts of distance, modalization, comprehensibility, and tension, as used for discourse analysis, can be applied to the analysis of speech events in literary texts. Such a linguistic approach may lead to new insights for the psychological description of authors and/or literary characters. Available from Dept. of English, University of…

Fantasy Theme Analysis was used to examine the rhetorical clash of incongruent world views during the 1978 controversy over a gay rights ordinance in St. Paul, Minnesota. Fantasy Theme Analysis considers the individual and collective dramatizations of a group's goals, scope, and activities--the group's conceptualized reality, or fantasy theme--in…

In 1965, transcripts were collected of 72 sermons on the issue of racial integration preached between 1955 and 1965. The sermons, all given by Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Episcopal ministers in the southern United States, were examined to determine the position advocated by the minister. The sermons deemed segregationist were then…

Using some of the tools of fantasy theme analysis, this paper analyzes the rhetoric of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy during the United States Civil War, as an expression of the rhetorical visions of the American South. Specifically, the paper deals with two speeches--Davis's farewell to the United States Senate, from which he…

Because children are exposed to highly professional sales pitches on television and because the old material produced by the Institute of Propaganda Analysis is outdated and in error, a new tool for the analysis of propaganda and persuasion is called for. Such a tool is the intensify/downplay pattern analysis chart, which includes the basic…