Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language
Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Renard Press Ltd
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-01-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1913724271

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Politics and the English Language, the second in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell takes aim at the language used in politics, which, he says, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. In an age where the language used in politics is constantly under the microscope, Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is just as relevant today, and gives the reader a vital understanding of the tactics at play. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Political Discourse

Political Discourse
Author: L. H. LaRue
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0820336270

Watergate has already told us much about the political dynamics of the presidency. In Political Discourse, L. H. LaRue shows that it can also reveal much about Congress, the men and women we elect to be our collective voice in Washington. Retracing the debates in the House Judiciary Committee as it voted on the articles of impeachment, LaRue shows that our representatives—all of them lawyers—chose to center their discussions largely on the president's violation of the law. Yet, LaRue suggests, far greater matters than simple lawlessness were at stake. By choosing to organize their discussions predominantly around the concept of “rule of law,” our representatives sidestepped the crucial issues of government ethics, the public trust, and democracy itself that Watergate raised. In this way, they failed in their role as representatives and misstated the deepest concerns of their constituents. LaRue proposes that breach of trust, not rule of law, should have been the focus of the discussions. Such a metaphor would have been less legalistic, closer to most Americans' true concerns. It would have created a more wide-ranging debate that better encompassed the crucial issues that surrounded Watergate—one that spoke for our determination as a people to resist tyrants who threaten our democracy.

The Voice of the People

The Voice of the People
Author: David Charles Gore
Publisher: Maxwell Institute Brigham Young University
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Book of Mormon
ISBN: 9781944394745

Voice in Political Discourse

Voice in Political Discourse
Author: Antonio Reyes
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2011-10-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1441134204

Politicians enact three main roles in political discourse - narrator, interlocutor and character - to achieve specific goals. This book explains these roles and how they constitute discursive strategies, correlating with political aims. In short: politicians evoke voices in discourse to strategically position themselves in relation to social actors and events. The book describes these strategies and analyzes the manner in which they are employed by three very different politicians - Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and George W. Bush. The roles are studied cross-culturally and from different ideological backgrounds. This book explains how political ideologies are constructed, defined and redefined by linguistic means, showing specific ways in which politicians manipulate language to achieve the goals on their political agenda. It applies new methodological approaches to the analysis of political discourse and also contributes to the sparse literature on political discourse analysis of Spanish-speaking politicians.

Vote and Voice

Vote and Voice
Author: Wendy B Sharer
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2007-03-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780809327508

Vote and Voice is the first book-length study to address the writing and speaking practices of members of women's political organizations in the decade after the suffrage movement.

Speaking with the People's Voice

Speaking with the People's Voice
Author: Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2014-03-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1623490448

The role of public opinion in American democracy has been a central concern of scholars who frequently examine how public opinion influences policy makers and how politicians, especially presidents, try to shape public opinion. But in Speaking with the People’s Voice: How Presidents Invoke Public Opinion, Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury asks a different question that adds an important new dimension to the study of public opinion: How do presidents rhetorically use public opinion in their speeches? In a careful analysis supported by case studies and discrete examples, Drury develops the concept of “invoked public opinion” to study the modern presidents’ use of public opinion as a rhetorical resource. He defines the term as “the rhetorical representation of the beliefs and values of US citizens.” Speaking with the People’s Voice considers both the strategic and democratic value of invoked public opinion by analyzing how modern presidents argumentatively deploy references to the beliefs and values of US citizens as persuasive appeals as well as acts of political representation in their nationally televised speeches.

Vernacular Voices

Vernacular Voices
Author: Gerard A. Hauser
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2022-01-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1643362860

An award-winning study of how formal and informal public discourse shapes opinions A foundational text of twenty-first-century rhetorical studies, Vernacular Voices addresses the role of citizen voices in steering a democracy through an examination of the rhetoric of publics. Gerard A. Hauser maintains that the interaction between everyday and official discourse discloses how active members of a complex society discover and clarify their shared interests and engage in exchanges that shape their opinions on issues of common interest. In the two decades since Vernacular Voices was first published, much has changed: in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US presidents have increasingly taken unilateral power to act; the internet and new media have blossomed; and globalization has raised challenges to the autonomy of nation states. In a new preface, Hauser shows how, in an era of shared, global crises, we understand publics, how public spheres form and function, and the possibilities for vernacular expressions of public opinion lie at the core of lived democracy. A foreword is provided by Phaedra C. Pezzullo, associate professor of communication at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The Rhetoric of Political Leadership

The Rhetoric of Political Leadership
Author: Ofer Feldman
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020-04-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1789904587

This timely book details the theoretical and practical elements of political rhetoric and their effects on the interactions between politicians and the public. Expert contributors explore the issues associated with political rhetoric from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including political science, linguistics, social psychology and communication studies. Chapters examine what makes a speech effective, politicians’ use of moral appeals in political advertising, political attacks on social media, and gender and emotion in political discourse.

The Unheavenly Chorus

The Unheavenly Chorus
Author: Kay Lehman Schlozman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 727
Release: 2012
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691154848

Examining the current state of democracy in the United States, 'The Unheavenly Chorus' looks at the political participation of individual citizens - alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests - in order to demonstrate that American democracy is marred by ingrained and persistent class-based inequality.