Making the Case

Advocacy and Judgment in Public Argument

Kathryn M. Olson, Michael William Pfau, Benjamin Ponder, Kirt H. Wilson

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781611860528
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628950939
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In an era when the value of the humanities and qualitative inquiry has been questioned in academia and beyond, Making the Case is an engaging and timely collection that brings together a veritable who's who of public address scholars to illustrate the power of case-based scholarly argument and to demonstrate how critical inquiry into a specific moment speaks to general contexts and theories. Providing both a theoretical framework and a wealth of historically situated texts, Making the Case spans from Homeric Greece to twenty-first-century America. The authors examine the dynamic interplay of texts and their concomitant rhetorical situations by drawing on a number of case studies, including controversial constitutional arguments put forward by activists and presidents in the nineteenth century, inventive economic pivots by Franklin Roosevelt and Alan Greenspan, and the rhetorical trajectory and method of Barack Obama.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Reflections on Making the Case
• The Beginnings of Oratorical Consciousness: Restarting Time in Homer's Odyssey, The Telemachy
• Lysander Spooner's The Unconstitutionality of Slavery: A Case Study in Constitutional Hermeneutics, Ethical Argument, and Practical Reason
• Kind Persuasion: Lincoln's Temperance Address and the Ethos of Civic Friendship
• Andrew Johnson's Fight for States' Rights on the Battlements of the Constitution
• No End Save Victory: FDR and the End of Isolationism, 1936-1941
• Iraq as a Representative Anecdote for Leadership: Barack Obama's Address on the Fifth Anniversary of the Iraq War
• Barack Obama's 2009 Inaugural Address: Narrative Signature and Interpretation
• To Exist, You Need an Ideology: Alan Greenspan on Markets, Crisis, and Democracy
• Contributors