A. Cheree Carlson

Strategies of Redemption at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial.

The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C. creates a unique opportunity for the critic to investigate the cycle of guilt and redemption set in motion by the Vietnam War. The Memorial serves as a call to eloquence, prompting many visitors to leave messages. The form of the message is determined by the individuals choice of redemptive ritual. The interplay of authors’ goals and strategies is reflected in messages which pursue redemption through either scapegoating or mortification.

Creative casuistry and feminist consciousness: The rhetoric of moral reform

The American Female Moral Reform Society was one of the first ante‐bellum reform movements to be founded and controlled by women. This paper examines the rhetoric of the societys primary organ, The Advocate of Moral Reform, to discover how these women justified abandoning their traditional feminine roles to pursue social change. The analysis reveals that through skillful casuistic stretching of the feminine ideal, the women were able to justify non‐traditional actions in the name of traditional values. In so doing, the movement also created a new feminist consciousness that recognized the essential victimage of all women and their power to instigate social change.

Revisionism and collective memory: The struggle for meaning in the Amistad affair

This essay problematizes “history” and “public memory” by examining their polysemic and polyvalent nature. Collective memories are selectively chosen and highlighted to fit the needs of a particular social group. Ownership of “history” then becomes a hegemonic device that controls our interpretation of the past and subsequent behavior in the future. In the case of the “Amistad Affair, “the ramifications of these choices reached from the early nineteenth century court of law to the Hollywood studio of the late twentieth century. Thus, it serves as a paradigm case of the struggle over who controls the narrative possibilities of history and memory.

“You know it when you see it:” The rhetorical hierarchy of race and gender in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander

Kenneth Burke places order and hierarchy at the heart of his rhetorical theory. The impulse to order creates categories of terms used by cultures to construct social orders based on race, gender, class and economic status. These lead to a “paradox of purity” wherein individuals are evaluated substantively from that category despite their individual motivations. In 1925, a woman of mixed blood was accused of defrauding her husband by “passing” as white. Her white lawyers were required to maintain the racist social structure while simultaneously freeing their client from the strictures of that structure. The paradox of purity was resolved through a transformation of terms until an ultimate order was recreated that retained the hierarchy, yet placed another collective category, gender, at the pinnacle.

The role of character in public moral argument: Henry ward Beecher and the Brooklyn scandal

The narrative perspective assumes that people may argue using premises based upon stories and dramas that have correspondence to their life experience. A central element of these stories is the characterization of their protagonists. This paper explores the importance of character by analyzing how it was utilized by the principals in the adultery trials of Henry Ward Beecher. It reveals how characterizations that were created in the literary realm were transferred to the arguments centering around the ministerial role as represented by Beecher. The successful transfer completely altered the audiences interpretations of the events in question.

Defining Womanhood: Lucretia Coffin Mott and the Transformation of Femininity.

Kenneth Burke claims that “bridging devices”; are important symbolic tools for overcoming division within a social order. This study investigates the use of “bridging devices”; through an analysis of an early feminist text: Lucretia Coffin Motts “Discourse on Woman”; (1849). Mott uses the Quaker concept of the “inner light”; to balance the tension between her conservative cultural milieu and her radical goals. Motts rhetoric is instructive for modern feminists who face the task of uniting women with widely disparate cultural roots.

Character invention in the letters of Maimie Pinzer

The concept of “narrative” is becoming an avenue through which scholars can privilege nontraditional forms of communication. Communication scholars have been attempting to discover how some narratives may “ring true” with an audience by studying the strategies of the storytellers. This study brings these two impulses together through a case study of autobiographical letters written by a turn of the century prostitute to a Boston matron. In creating a narrative of her life, the author uses several rhetorical strategies to recreate her character so as to persuade her audience that she is worthy of respect. In so doing, she also persuades herself.

Narrative as the philosopher's stone: How Russell H. Conwell changed lead into diamonds

Russell H. Conwells once famous speech, “Acres of Diamonds,” has been dismissed by both historians and rhetoricians as a shallow expression of the Horatio Alger myth. This conclusion does not explain how Conwell was able to win nationwide audiences for over fifty years. A Burkean analysis of the speech reveals that Conwells formula for success relied upon a masterful transformation of pentadic ratios, carried on through the medium of the “true‐life” success story. The speech illustrates the power such narratives have in altering an audiences perception of its role in a greater drama.