This volume features two dimensions of Michael Osborn’s work with rhetorical metaphor. The first focuses on his early efforts to develop a conception of metaphor to advance the understanding of rhetoric, while the second concerns more recent efforts to apply this enriched conception in the analysis and criticism of significant rhetorical practice. The older emphasis features four of Osborn’s more prominent published essays, revealing the personal context in which they were generated, their strengths and shortcomings, and how they may have inspired the work of others. His more recent unpublished work analyzes patterns of metaphor in the major speeches of Demosthenes, the evolution of metaphors of illness and cure in speeches across several millennia, the exploitation of the birth-death-rebirth metaphor in Riefenstahl’s masterpiece of Nazi propaganda Triumph of the Will, and the contrasting forms of spatial imagery in the speeches of Edmund Burke and Barack Obama and what these contrasts may portend.

How presidential metaphors have shaped US discourse on the Persian Gulf From the 1970s to the 1990s American presidents and their advisers introduced four metaphors into foreign-policy discourse that taught Americans to view the Persian Gulf as a vulnerable region and site of US responsibility on the world stage. In Securing the Prize: Presidential Metaphor and US Intervention in the Persian Gulf, Randall Fowler argues that, for half a century, metaphor has been central to defining America's role in the Middle East. Metaphors served as shorthand for presidents to promote their policies, filtering through the judgments of officials, journalists, experts, and critics to mediate American perceptions of the Gulf War. Tracing the use of security metaphors from President Richard Nixon to President George W. Bush, Fowler revises mainstream understandings regarding the origins of the War on Terror and explains the disconnect between skeptical public attitudes toward US involvement in the Gulf War and the heavy American military footprint in the region.

Ending a war, as Fred Charles Iklé wrote, poses a much greater challenge than beginning one. In addition to issues related to battle tactics, prisoners of war, diplomatic relations, and cease-fire negotiations, ending war involves domestic political calculations. Balancing the tides of public opinion versus policy needs poses a deep and enduring problem for presidents. In a first-of-its-kind study, Resowing the Seeds of War explains how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Obama managed the political, policy, and bureaucratic challenges that arise at the end of war via a series of rhetorical choices that reframe, modify, or unravel depictions of national enemies, the cause of the conflict, and the stakes for the nation and world. This end-of-war rhetoric justifies ending hostilities, rationalizes postwar national policy, argues for the construction of postwar security arrangements, and often sustains public support for massive financial investment in reconstruction. By tracking presidential manipulations of savage imagery from World War II to the War on Terror, this book concludes that even as metaphoric reframing facilitates exit from conflict, it incurs unexpected consequences that make national involvement in the next conflict more likely.

Covering a broad range of rhetorical perspectives, Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action, third edition presents a well-grounded introduction to the basics of rhetorical criticism and theory in an accessible manner for advanced undergraduate courses and introductory graduate courses. Throughout the text, sample essays written by noted experts in the field provide students with models for writing their own criticisms. In addition to covering traditional modes of rhetorical criticism, the book introduces less commonly discussed rhetorical perspectives as well as orientations toward performing criticisms including close-textual analysis, critical approaches, and analysis of visual and digital rhetoric. The third edition includes the following features: New chapters on visual rhetoric and digital rhetoric Potentials and Pitfalls sections analyzing individual perspectives Activities and discussion questions in each chapter Glossary of important terms

Decades before white women won the right to vote throughout the United States, they first secured that right in its Western region—beginning in Wyoming in 1869. Many scholars have studied why and how the Western states enfranchised women before the Eastern ones; this book instead examines the influence of the West on the national US suffrage movement. As the campaign for woman suffrage intensified, US suffragists often invoked the West in their verbal, visual, and embodied advocacy. In deploying this region as a persuasive resource, they challenged the traditional meanings of the West and East, thus gaining additional persuasive strategies. Tiffany Lewis’s analysis of the public discourse, images, and performances of suffragists and their opponents shows that the West played a pivotal role in the successful campaign for white women’s enfranchisement that culminated in 1920. In addition to offering a history of this political movement’s rhetorical strategy, Lewis illustrates the usefulness of region in protest—the way social movements can tactically employ region to motivate social change.

What is it about the rhetoric of one the most influential and powerful religious leaders in the world and in history—Pope Francis—that is so engaging and yet so challenging to the Church writ large, the American Congress, the news media, and the world? The Rhetoric of Pope Francis: Critical Mercy and Conversion for the Twenty-first Century provides extensive insight into this question through a close, in-depth rhetorical analysis of Pope Francis’s visual, spatial, tactile, written, and oral discourse. This analysis reveals how the interrelated topoi of illness, space, mercy, and conversion converge to articulate Francis’s vision for the Church. Under Francis, the Catholic Church’s virtue of mercy gets renewed and redeployed to papal, pastoral, and political sites for the purpose of conversion. Each chapter identifies several of Francis’s dominant rhetorical strategies. These “pope tropes” take the form of existing and widely held Catholic beliefs that, while stable, still invite interpretation, disputation, and open dialogue. Studying Francis’s various discourses provides us with an exemplary paradigm from which we can learn much about faith, humility, love, and papal rhetoric’s transformative capacity to help us live more compassionate lives.

"Collection of essays that reassesses history as rhetoric and rhetorical history as practice "--

The Reception of Northrup Frye takes a thorough accounting of the presence of Frye in existing works and argues against Frye's diminishing status as an important critical voice.

In 1940, Hans Augusto Rey and Margret Rey built two bikes, packed what they could, and fled wartime Paris. Among the possessions they escaped with was a manuscript that would later become one of the most celebrated books in children’s literature—Curious George. Since his debut in 1941, the mischievous icon has only grown in popularity. After being captured in Africa by the Man in the Yellow Hat and taken to live in the big city’s zoo, Curious George became a symbol of curiosity, adventure, and exploration. In Curious about George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism, author Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre argues that the beloved character also performs within a narrative of racism, colonialism, and heroism. Using theories of colonial and rhetorical studies to explain why cultural icons like Curious George are able to avoid criticism, Schwartz-DuPre investigates the ways these characters operate as capacious figures, embodying and circulating the narratives that construct them, and effectively argues that discourses about George provide a rich training ground for children to learn US citizenship and become innocent supporters of colonial American exceptionalism. By drawing on postcolonial theory, children’s criticisms, science and technology studies, and nostalgia, Schwartz-DuPre’s critical reading explains the dismissal of the monkey’s 1941 abduction from Africa and enslavement in the US, described in the first book, by illuminating two powerful roles he currently holds: essential STEM ambassador at a time when science and technology is central to global competitiveness and as a World War II refugee who offers a “deficient” version of the Holocaust while performing model US immigrant. Curious George’s twin heroic roles highlight racist science and an Americanized Holocaust narrative. By situating George as a representation of enslaved Africans and Holocaust refugees, Curious about George illuminates the danger of contemporary zero-sum identity politics, the colonization of marginalized identities, and racist knowledge production. Importantly, it demonstrates the ways in which popular culture can be harnessed both to promote colonial benevolence and to present possibilities for resistance.