Works Cited
To my idiosyncratic and lovely family . . .
with a shout out to Mr. Ko
Acknowledgments
Without the help of generous and thoughtful readers, this book would have remained stuck in the realm of fantasy. I am profoundly grateful to E. Shelley Reid and Deborah Kaplan, who wrestled with an early draft and did not declare it nonsense, but instead offered patient advice and generative feedback about how to focus and revise. Other generous colleagues who helped with editorial support and/or stimulating conversations include Robert Matz, Terry Zawicki, Tamara Harvey, Keith Clark, Stefan Wheelock, Barbara Gomperts, Richard Todd Stafford, Byron Hawk, Hephzibah Roskelley, Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, Stephen Yarbrough, Nancy Myers, Wendy Sharer, Bruce Southard, Sara Littlejohn, Abby Arnold, and Brandy Grabow. I am especially grateful to Laura Micciche for demonstrating that academic writing can be both lively and meaningful. I owe a debt of gratitude (after all these years) to the creative faculty I was fortunate to work with at UIC, including Clark Hulse, Chris Messenger, Margherita Pieracci Harwell, Virginia Wexman, Michael Lieb, Gene Ruoff, William Covino, David Jolliffe, and especially James Sosnoski and Patricia Harkin. My sincere thanks to Publisher David Blakesley for seeing potential in the manuscript and to copyeditor Heather Christiansen for meticulous editorial assistance. Friends who have energized my spirit with wisdom, humor, aplomb, and encouragement include Annette Van, Jeanne Follansbee, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Beth Franken, Jeanne Herrick, Cathy Colton, Consolato Gattuso (and Melissa, Tess, Dominick, and Jen), and Joe Rubino. I would also like to honor the memory of those who continue to matter, even if no longer here, including Antonetta Deddo, Helen Wiederhold, Charles Winslow Dulles Gayley, Michele Ciavarella Martinelli, Stephen Stallcup, Ryan Jenson Plachy, and Loran Dale Wiederhold. For evenings of merriment and camaraderie, I am most beholden to Denise Gayley, Joe Stack, Hope Nightingale, David Ellis, John and Margie Gayley, Anne Gabbert, Madi Ellis, and Iain Gayley. And above all, for support and inspiration (and pens, paper, eyedrops, and Italian sausage) I thank my family: Micki Deddo, Lou Armidano, Toni and Derrick Saunders, Brenda Leigh, Jeff Opie, Mark Wiederhold, and, especially, Jim Gayley, who sees between the leaves, hears what is unspoken, and understands my ideas before I do.
Introduction
People in the United States are expected to cherish the idea of free speech, but not all speech acts are welcome within public venues. The responsible citizen is expected to guard against the false claims and manufactured “talking points” of politicians whose rhetorical flourishes give cover to an unsavory lust for power. Political candidates tend to be commended when they speak with a blunt candor that seems to get to the facts and avoid verbal complexities. John McCain made an explicit promise when campaigning for president in 2008 to board the “straight talk express” in an effort to present himself as the people’s humble servant committed to a forthright style, as if making this pledge was unquestionably commendable and distinctive. The idea that honesty in speech means advancing past any distractions contrived by rhetoric has a long history in U.S. political discourse, its potency retained in part because of the undertheorized yet durable metaphor that crafts a conceptual linkage between linearity and discursive integrity.
This metaphorical cluster encodes a seemingly basic premise: methods exist for ascertaining how and what words mean. A promise to “speak straight” seems obtainable if language is imbued with a power to convey who signifies with probity and if citizens believe in their own integrity (i.e., honest citizens will know an honest representation when they see one and may justifiably castigate any speaker who puts forth anything but). Such beliefs create expectations about how language should be stylized, namely, that styles should be transparent so that rhetors may convey ideas that exist independently of the languages used to represent them. By channeling ideas and logic through figurative forms that do not obstruct the clarity of meaning, the plain style seems to fulfill this expectation.
One can hear echoes of the same idea in books such as the impatiently titled On Bullshit that found a publisher in 2005 as well as a receptive audience. Or in a 2008 advertisement for a local Chicago news station: “No bull. Truth in politics with Mike Flannery.”1 It underwrites the endeavors of cable news hosts such as Anderson Cooper who devotes a portion of his nightly program on CNN to “keeping them honest” by comparing a given politician’s statements to “the facts.” And it is an element in every media commentary that praises frankness and clarity in political speech when speculating on how a given statement has been interpreted by “America.” Such commentaries call upon audiences to trust those representations that deploy a positivistic logic that seems to bypass the arts of rhetoric by actively refusing the politicized, the false, the desirous and the mercenary. Audiences, meanwhile, are expected to appreciate representations that are factual, reasonable, and compelling to a majority, and to feel like virtuous citizens for ferreting out any attempted manipulation.
This book takes a closer look at how discourses of nationalism are encoded within the appeal of an “innocent rhetoric” that implicates public expectations about how language should be used and credibility judged. We are encouraged to find words that grab onto a quality of “apolitical authenticity” and turn it into a representational real. But the persistent need to proclaim that one is using language honestly and sincerely also expresses anxiety about the possibility of doing so. Contemporary language theories have fed that anxiety by challenging commonplace assumptions about how persuasive power works to achieve effects. They alert us to the ways in which attempts to clarify how to judge the genuine also obscure by concealing irresolvable ambiguities that inhere within the interpretive technologies used to evaluate who and what is credible. Indeed, the conceptual underpinnings of discursive practices that seem to disseminate representations that are straight, honest, and logical are tied neither to logic nor to a structural grammar but to narrative. We tell stories about a nation committed to discursive integrity, peopled by citizens who speak freely and invoke innate wisdom when distinguishing the reliable speaker from the political hack. A closer look at the storytelling elements of our conceptual frameworks raises an analytical problem about how to validate the interpretive apparatus that would steer evaluations of which language uses should make us wary.
That problem is made even more complicated by the question of how to regard style’s role within judgments of who to believe. Rhetorical style presents a particularly vexed topic because its status as an object of inquiry is paradoxically and simultaneously material and insubstantial. Style, one of the five canons of classical rhetoric, is most commonly described as the artful expression of ideas. But in contemporary life, the word style signifies multiple meanings that range from the demonstration of basic grammatical competence to a repertoire of protocols to aid communication to thoughtfully arranged word choices that convey a quality that is noticeable, idiosyncratic (Edward Corbett’s word), potentially provocative, and also indescribable. While rhetorical style is considered to be basic and elemental, exactly how style acts to influence the exchange of ideas remains undertheorized. Literary traditions have belittled rhetorical style, depicting it as a bureaucratic tool, its purview merely practical and detached from the honorable sublimity of the poetic. In political venues, style is treated with overt suspicion, envisioned as an impediment to the authentic presentation of heartfelt political points of view. Both of these stances call for further review.
It is my contention that rhetorical style plays a crucial role in establishing a democratic aesthetic, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Docherty, who portrays aesthetics as a “founding condition” for “establishing social and political democracy” (back cover). Aesthetics, like rhetorical style, is a term that conveys multiple meanings that range from the sensual appreciation
