Your search for: oxymoron

Reagan and Public Discourse in America assesses the rhetorical legacy of the Reagan Presidency. The essays in this collection focus on a variety of domestic and foreign policy controversies and identify a broad range of persuasive strategies and devices to reveal how Ronald Reagan both appropriated ...

Reagan and Public Discourse in America assesses the rhetorical legacy of the Reagan Presidency. The essays in this collection focus on a variety of domestic and foreign policy controversies and identify a broad range of persuasive strategies and devices to reveal how Ronald Reagan both appropriated and transformed American public discourse in the 1980s. Reagan's obvious skill at speech-making earned him the title "Great Communicator", but the contributors to this book seek his rhetorical significance in deeper waters. They analyze Reagan's impact not only on the policy issues of the 1980s but also on the process of public political discourse itself. The contributors uncover ways in which Ronald Reagan helped to change how we talk about public issues, and, just as important, what kinds of issues we talk about. They find Reagan a constricting and distorting influence; his rhetoric tended to remove some issues from public debate and to limit the discussion of others chiefly to rituals, gestures, andevasions. From nuclear strategy to social welfare programs, from budget policy to military intervention, Reagan's rhetoric impoverished and perverted political discourse in the public sphere. Taken together, the essays in this collection challenge the traditional emphasis in rhetorical criticism on individual speech texts in unique historical situations. The contributors find the "text" of their analyses not only in Reagan's public comments on a particular issue, but in the articulation of this issue-specific rhetoric with the historically evolving process of public discourse as a whole. Here, they argue, is where Reagan's greatest significance as a communicator is to be found.

Horace's Odes are among the most popular and the most misunderstood of ancient writings. In this new paperback edition, the authors discuss each ode against its Greek and Roman background to ensure a clearer understanding of its classical and scholarly nature. The commentary includes a large number ...

Horace's Odes are among the most popular and the most misunderstood of ancient writings. In this new paperback edition, the authors discuss each ode against its Greek and Roman background to ensure a clearer understanding of its classical and scholarly nature. The commentary includes a large number of parallel passages--showing how Horace plays new variations on old themes--sections on chronology and meter, and a select bibliography for each ode.

In The Art of Poetry, Shira Wolosky provides a dazzling introduction to an art whose emphasis on verbal music, wordplay, and dodging the merely literal makes it at once the most beguiling and most challenging of literary forms. A uniquely comprehensive, step-by-step introduction to poetic form ...

In The Art of Poetry, Shira Wolosky provides a dazzling introduction to an art whose emphasis on verbal music, wordplay, and dodging the merely literal makes it at once the most beguiling and most challenging of literary forms. A uniquely comprehensive, step-by-step introduction to poetic form, The Art of Poetry moves progressively from smaller units such as the word, line, and image, to larger features such as verse forms and voice. In fourteen engaging, beautifully written chapters, Wolosky explores in depth how poetry does what it does while offering brilliant readings of some of the finest lyric poetry in the English and American traditions. Both readers new to poetry and poetry veterans will be moved and enlightened as Wolosky interprets work by William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, and others. The book includes a superb two-chapter discussion of the sonnet's form and history, and represents the first poetry guide to introduce gender as a basic element of analysis. In contrast to many existing guides, which focus on selected formal aspects like metrics or present definitions and examples in a handbook format, The Art of Poetry covers the full landscape of poetry's subtle art while showing readers how to comprehend a poetic text in all its dimensions. Other special features include Wolosky's consideration of historical background for the developments she discusses, and the way her book is designed to acquaint or reacquaint readers with the core of the lyric tradition in English. Lively, accessible, and original, The Art of Poetry will be a rich source of inspiration for students, general readers, and those who teach poetry.