Making the Case: Advocacy and Judgment in Public Argument(Rhetoric & Public Affairs)

In an era when the value of the humanities and qualitative inquiry has been questioned in academia and beyond, Making the Case is an engaging and timely collection that brings together a veritable who’s who of public address scholars to illustrate the power of case-based scholarly argument and to demonstrate how critical inquiry into a specific moment speaks to general contexts and theories. Providing both a theoretical framework and a wealth of historically situated texts, Making the Case spans from Homeric Greece to twenty-first-century America. The authors examine the dynamic interplay of texts and their concomitant rhetorical situations by drawing on a number of case studies, including controversial constitutional arguments put forward by activists and presidents in the nineteenth century, inventive economic pivots by Franklin Roosevelt and Alan Greenspan, and the rhetorical trajectory and method of Barack Obama.

Table of Contents:
Contents Preface Acknowledgments Reflections on Making the Case | David Zarefsky The Beginnings of Oratorical Consciousness: Restarting Time in Homer’s Odyssey, The Telemachy | G. Thomas Goodnight Lysander Spooner’s The Unconstitutionality of Slavery: A Case Study in Constitutional Hermeneutics, Ethical Argument, and Practical Reason | James Jasinski Kind Persuasion: Lincoln’s Temperance Address and the Ethos of Civic Friendship | Michael Leff Andrew Johnson’s Fight for States’ Rights on the Battlements of the Constitution | Karlyn Kohrs Campbell No End Save Victory: FDR and the End of Isolationism, 1936–1941 | John M. Murphy Iraq as a Representative Anecdote for Leadership: Barack Obama’s Address on the Fifth Anniversary of the Iraq War | Denise M. Bostdorff Barack Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address: Narrative Signature and Interpretation | Martin J. Medhurst To Exist, You Need an Ideology: Alan Greenspan on Markets, Crisis, and Democracy | Robert Asen Contributors

About the Author :
Kathryn M. Olson is Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, USA. Benjamin Ponder is an executive in the educational software industry. Michael William Pfau is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Minnesota–Duluth, USA. Kirt H. Wilson is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Review :
Making the Case offers examples of why careful, case-based, prudential criticism leads to scholarship that is wise and ennobling. —Stephen John Hartnett, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado–Denver