Maurice Charland

Law, rhetoric, and irony in the formation of Canadian civil culture

In Rhetoric, Irony, and Law in the Formation of Canadian Civil Culture, Michael Dorland and Maurice Charland examine how, over the roughly 400-year period since the encounter of First Peoples with Europeans in North America, rhetorical or discursive fields took form in politics and constitution-making, in the formation of a public sphere, and in education and language. The study looks at how these fields changed over time within the French regime, the British regime, and in Canada since 1867, and how they converged through trial and error into a Canadian civil culture. The authors establish a triangulation of fields of discourse formed by law (as a technical discourse system), rhetoric (as a public discourse system), and irony (as a means of accessing the public realm as the key pillars upon which a civil culture in Canada took form) in order to scrutinize the process of creating a civil culture. By presenting case studies ranging from the legal implications of the transition from French to English law to the continued importance of the Louis Riel case and trial, the authors provide detailed analyses of how communication practices form a common institutional culture. As scholars of communication and rhetoric, Dorland and Charland have written a challenging examination of the history of Canadian governance and the central role played by legal and other discourses in the formation of civil culture.

The Place of Impiety in Civic Argument

Abstract This paper considers the place of impiety within democratic theory. Contemporary political theory is concerned with discourse and has developed communicative norms to deliberation in the public sphere. These norms of deliberative democracy require, however, that participants be reasonable and guided by goodwill. These theorists do not give serious consideration to impiety, and in particular to its possibilities to move beyond antagonism, enabling prudence and promoting philia, civic friendship. A brief critical discussion of Seyla Benhabib’s conception of deliberative democracy is followed by a discussion of the relationship of rhetoric to prudence. While prudence is usually considered in Aristotelian terms, it can also be viewed Sophistically. Sophistic prudence is strategic, impious, and often uses laughter. Three cases of impiety are then briefly examined.

Canada in the age of terror: The metaphysics of the cottage

Abstract This essay offers a wry analysis of the manner in which elements of Canada’s rhetorical culture inflect its response to international affairs. Canada’s public and private response to international conflicts in an “Age of Terror” is examined as an instance of disengagement and irony through the metaphor of the “cottage.”