{"title":"\"Childish Things\": Tragic Conservatism, White Evangelicalism, and The Challenge of Racial Reconciliation","authors":"J. Hatch","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0587","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0587","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48285955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reagan and Israel: Heroic Democracy in the Holy Land","authors":"Randall Fowler","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0455","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0455","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:While scholars have studied Ronald Reagan's relationship with Israel from a diplomatic, strategic, or political lobbying perspective, few have examined this relationship rhetorically. I argue that despite Reagan's private disagreements with Israel, his public rhetoric consistently depicted Israel within the mythic terms of the Cold War as a heroic democracy like the United States. Drawing on discourses of American exceptionalism, terrorism, and Holocaust remembrance, Reagan's rhetoric constrained his diplomatic ability to deal with Israeli aggression and continues to shape American presidential discourse.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45874077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Technocratic Machine: The Memex as Rhetorical Invention","authors":"Katie P. Bruner","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0495","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Memex is an icon in the history of computer technology. It was first presented to the public in a 1945 Life Magazine article as \"a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.\" The Memex itself was never built, but the image of what machines like it could do captured the imagination of a generation of computer engineers. The Memex was designed by an engineer and science administrator named Vannevar Bush, but he had actually designed the Memex to address inter-war America: the Memex article was written during the tumult of the late 1930s and largely untouched during World War II. This article examines the Memex within this interwar context, paying particular attention to how Bush used the design of a technological prototype to imagine how machines could help humans navigate the modern world. I argue that this effort was an act of rhetorical invention and show that the design of the Memex was a vehicle for Bush to endorse technocratic authority over American life.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47114288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Complicity of Racial and Rhetorical Pessimism: The Coherence and Promise of the Long Civil Rights Movement","authors":"David A. Frank","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0553","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0553","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43039261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"(Re)-Signing Reconciliation: Reading Obama's Charleston Eulogy through a Rhetorical Theory of Adaptive Racism","authors":"McPhail","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0529","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:One cannot truly understand America without understanding the historical experience of black people in this nation. Simply put, to get to the heart of this country one must examine its racial soul. Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.The Roof massacre was a shocking throwback to this country's deplorable racial past. But the vast majority of whites have moved beyond that past. Most whites and most blacks wish only to be allowed to get along, outside enforced race consciousness. Pockets of virulent racial contempt still exist (as much among blacks as among whites), but they are irrelevant to the millions of individual behavioral choices that drive social and economic outcomes.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46563254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Catastrophe to Come: Prefiguring Hurricane Katrina's Public Memory through the Anxious Melancholic Rhetoric of \"The Big One\"","authors":"Grossman","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0417","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The city of New Orleans has long narrated its own demise through reference to \"the Big One,\" a singular hurricane that would destroy the city for good. The \"catastrophe to come\" is a more or less permanent spectral presence for many of its residents, evidence of which can be traced as far back as the city's founding in 1718. When it comes to memorialization of Katrina, the central question of this essay is: how does one analyze public memory of an event so thoroughly anticipated, indeed, whose historical anticipation is fundamental to the later memory of it? Rather than merely acting as the historical context within which public memory comes to be interpreted, this anticipation and the anxiety that marks its form figures directly into the reading of the later memory object itself. In this essay, I argue that the repeated narrativization of the Big One is an anxious rhetoric that prefigures post-Katrina memory objects through a process of melancholic rhetorical incorporation. I first engage the history of New Orleans and this anxiety, extrapolating my usage of anxiety and melancholy as rhetorical concepts along the way. Then, I tender a critical analysis that first reads two narratives of such destruction to describe memory's prefiguration and then turns symmetrically to two post-Katrina memory objects to demonstrate the work of incorporation in the production of memory objects.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46399526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home by Melanie Loehwing (review)","authors":"Jay P. Childers","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.4.0767","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.4.0767","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46372657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement by James Wynn (review)","authors":"Karen Schroeder Sorensen","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.4.0764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.4.0764","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48058260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"After Gun Violence: Deliberation and Memory in an Age of Political Gridlock by Craig Rood (review)","authors":"Christopher M. Duerringer","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.4.0797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.4.0797","url":null,"abstract":"Aparadox lies at the heart of the debate over guns and gun control in the United States. A clear majority of the voting public supports a number of different proposals to regulate access to firearms and the type of firearms available for sale. According to a May 2019 Quinnipiac University poll, nearly three-quarters of Americans say that more needs to be done to address gun violence; 94 percent support universal background checks for those purchasing firearms; and 63 percent support a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons. However, there seems to be little sign of any progress with these issues. In fact, there is even evidence from a Pew Research Center study published in March 2018 that gun laws have been loosened in the years since the mass murder of 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. In After Gun Violence, Craig Rood leverages scholarship on public memory to help explain the general gridlock that marks contemporary discourse about guns and gun control in the United States. Putting public memory in conversation with deliberation invites an analysis that cuts both ways: “First, public deliberation shapes public memory . . . Second, public memory shapes public deliberation” (24). A product of rhetoric itself, public memory influences the choices we make when deciding what is worth talking about; what meanings we make about what is happening now; and what courses of action are warranted, feasible, and virtuous. These acts will undoubtedly, although partially, be remembered when future interlocutors find themselves pressed to make meaning about what is happening in their own time. Rood explains the effectiveness of the gun lobby in resisting legal reform largely in terms of its highly selective remembrance of the Founding","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45368484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}