Lisa Storm Villadsen

Speaking on Behalf of Others: Rhetorical Agency and Epideictic Functions in Official Apologies

The official apology is a discursive phenomenon with complex rhetorical significance and must be distinguished from the apologia. The main difference is that the official apology entails an element of regret and acknowledgement of wrongdoing that makes it an even more delicate rhetorical matter than the apologia—not least because it involves a collectivity such as a nation state. The symbolic nature of the assumption of guilt is therefore particularly clear. This article argues that official apologies, however circumscribed by public skepticism, nevertheless may serve important functions as loci for articulating the norms of a society at a given time. The article discusses how the official apology raises a host of issues concerning rhetorical agency and argues that this particular type of rhetoric is promising point of departure in the ongoing pedagogical and theoretical exploration of the concept of rhetorical agency. By integrating theories of epideictic rhetoric and of rhetorical agency, the complexity of the official apology is analyzed, and through a reading of an official apology by the Danish Prime minister, the essay examines how rhetorical agency is both established and undercut by the speaker.

Rhetorical citizenship: studying the discursive crafting and enactment of citizenship

Abstract This article argues for the relevance of a rhetorical approach to the study of citizenship, proposing the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a term for a fourth dimension of citizenship and as a scholarly approach to the topic in addition to the dimensions of status, rights, and identity commonly recognized in the literature. We show how this view aligns with current views of the multidi Citizenship Studies mensionality of citizenship, explain our use of the term rhetoric, and illustrate the usefulness of a rhetorical approach in two examples. In close textual readings both examples – one vernacular, one elite – are shown to discursively craft and enact different notions of citizenship vis-a-vis the European refugee crisis. We conclude that a rhetorical perspective on public civic discourse is useful in virtue of its close attention to discursive creativity as well as to textual properties that may significantly, but often implicitly, affect citizens’ understanding of their own role in the polity, and further because it recognizes deep differences as inevitable while valorizing discourse across them.

Doxa, Dissent, and Challenges of Rhetorical Citizenship: “When I Criticize Denmark, It Is not the White Nights or the New Potatoes I Have In Mind”

This article explores an instance of citizen dissent being combatted by elite politicians and the dissenting citizen’s resistance to these attacks. Proceeding from Ivie’s and Thimsen’s understandings of dissent as intimately linked to mainstream discourse and of dissent’s potential for democratic participation and rhetorical invention realised by means of rhetorical troping, the article also invokes Phillips’ work on spaces of dissension. The article concludes with a discussion of the difficulties in realising ideals of deliberative democracy as conceived within the conceptual frame of rhetorical citizenship and potential avenues for theory development followed by a discussion of the potential of rhetorical troping to establish consubstantiality in a gridlocked debate.