Examines Korean president Roh Tae-woo's 1988 Inaugural Address. Focuses on audience expectations on this occasion, which include the influence of Confucianism and of Western political ideas, recent Korean political history, and the speech as an inaugural delivered at the end of an unusual and challenging campaign. (SR)

The capability approach advocates that interpersonal comparisons be made in the space of functionings and capabilities. However, Amartya Sen has not specified which capabilities should be selected as the relevant ones. This has provoked two types of criticism. The stronger critique is Martha Nussbaum's claim that Sen should endorse one specific…

To affirm Sojourner Truth as a powerful rhetor who advanced the equality and empowerment of women, a study examined several of her speeches on women's suffrage. Although the value of using such role models as Sojourner Truth has been demonstrated in various grade levels, and in the study of history and English, the approach is too seldom employed…

As background to an argument for purposive reintegration of discourse study, this paper examines the concept of explanatory discourse as it developed within the Western rhetorical tradition. Following a discussion of the rise of a rhetoric of explanation, the first section cites the roots of the explanatory pedagogy developing during the first…

Deprived of a given world an author can assume he shares with his readers, an author today is thereby also deprived of a given rhetoric and must create his own. (JH)

For the generation of Americans who witnessed and perhaps even fought against the Hitler regime, the consequences of his political manipulation had a significant and tangible impact on their lives. For younger generations it is necessary to work to understand how Hitler constructed his appeals to the German people. While a great deal of his…

Fifty-five million people were transfixed before their television sets in July 1987 by the agonistic 21-minute summation of Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii of the events of the congressional inquiry into the Iran-Contra scandal. Senator Inouye's text summarized and characterized split national purposes that collided, in which norms and codes of…

The rhetorical functions of history depend on the domain in which history is used, with no connotations of interpretive priority attaching to the social or the academic realm. The appropriation of history in support of social causes as radically opposed as socialism and fascism fuels the temptation to subsume history under ideology, with the…

The rhetoric program at the University of Iowa is an integrated skills program based on four assumptions: (1) writing and speaking are modes of communication, (2) writing and speaking are equally important, (3) writing and speaking can be taught together, and (4) the administration, relevant faculty, and teachers must believe that writing and…

Julius Streicher, the German publisher sentenced to death in the Nuremberg trials for rhetorical crimes against humanity, published the widely-read and virulently anti-semitic weekly tabloid "Der Stuermer" from 1923 to 1945. Through Streicher's rhetoric and through the publication's cartoons, Jews were depicted as bacilli, vampires,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 23 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the rhetoric of various reformers and reform groups; speech disorganization and information retention, credibility, and attitude; the concurring and dissenting…

Because President Lyndon Johnson understood well the publicity value of the American news media, he sought to exploit them. He saw reporters as "torch bearers" for his programs and policies and used the presidential press conference chiefly for promotional purposes. Although he met with reporters often, his press conferences were usually…

Two speeches by Betty Friedan, author of "The Feminine Mystique" and first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), are examined in this paper. The first speech analyzed, "Tokenism and the Pseudo-Radical Cop-Out," was delivered at Cornell University in January, 1969, and the second, a "Call to Women's Strike…

Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech is presented in this paper and shown to be an effective vehicle for helping students discover the power of language and of literature. The paper first discusses the potentially destructive way English teachers sometimes tell students about "hidden meanings" in long and complex works…

A historical review of theories of persuasion and its relationship to such areas as argument and propaganda indicates a number of inherent weaknesses in the definitions and taxonomies which have been proposed. Definitions and classifications have been sometimes circular in nature, have reflected the special interests of their authors, have been…