Reagan and Public Discourse in America (Studies in Rhetoric and Communication) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817305858 ISBN 13: 9780817305857

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 1992

Synopsis

Reagan and Public Discourse in America is a critical assessment of the impact of the administration of President Ronald Reagan on public discourse in the United States. The authors show that more than any president since John F. Kennedy, Reagan’s influence flowed from his rhetorical practices. And he is remembered as having reversed certain trends and cast the U.S. on a new course. The contributors to this insightful collection of essays show that Reagan’s rhetorical tactics were matters of primary concern to his administration’s chief political strategists.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Reagan and Public Discourse in America assesses the rhetorical legacy of the Reagan Presidency. The essays in this collection focus on a variety of domestic and foreign policy controversies and identify a broad range of persuasive strategies and devices to reveal how Ronald Reagan both appropriated and transformed American public discourse in the 1980s. Reagan's obvious skill at speech-making earned him the title "Great Communicator", but the contributors to this book seek his rhetorical significance in deeper waters. They analyze Reagan's impact not only on the policy issues of the 1980s but also on the process of public political discourse itself. The contributors uncover ways in which Ronald Reagan helped to change how we talk about public issues, and, just as important, what kinds of issues we talk about. They find Reagan a constricting and distorting influence; his rhetoric tended to remove some issues from public debate and to limit the discussion of others chiefly to rituals, gestures, and evasions. From nuclear strategy to social welfare programs, from budget policy to military intervention, Reagan's rhetoric impoverished and perverted political discourse in the public sphere. Taken together, the essays in this collection challenge the traditional emphasis in rhetorical criticism on individual speech texts in unique historical situations. The contributors find the "text" of their analyses not only in Reagan's public comments on a particular issue, but in the articulation of this issue-specific rhetoric with the historically evolving process of public discourse as a whole. Here, they argue, is where Reagan's greatest significance as a communicator is to be found.

About the Author:

Michael Weiler is an associate professor in the department of communication studies at Emerson College. An expert in argument, rhetoric, and political communication, he is the author of research that has appeared in Argumentation and Advocacy, Informal Logic, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. He is director of Emerson Community Debate, a program that promotes debating activities at Boston elementary and secondary schools.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0817305858
• ISBN 13: 9780817305857
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Michael Weiler, W. Barnett Pearce