Politics and the English Language
Politics and the English Language

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Renard Press Ltd

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1913724271

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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

Published: 2010-06-01

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0820336270

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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.

Voices of Modernity
Voices of Modernity

Author: Richard Bauman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-07-03

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9780521008976

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Language and tradition have long been relegated to the sidelines as scholars have considered the role of politics, science, technology and economics in the making of the modern world. This novel reading of over two centuries of philosophy, political theory, anthropology, folklore and history argues that new ways of imagining language and representing supposedly premodern people - the poor, labourers, country folk, non-europeans and women - made political and scientific revolutions possible. The connections between language ideologies, privileged linguistic codes, and political concepts and practices shape the diverse ways we perceive ourselves and others. Bauman and Briggs demonstrate that contemporary efforts to make schemes of social inequality based on race, gender, class and nationality seem compelling and legitimate, rely on deeply-rooted ideas about language and tradition. Showing how critics of modernity unwittingly reproduce these foundational fictions, they suggest new strategies for challenging the undemocratic influence of these voices of modernity.

Voice in Political Discourse
Voice in Political Discourse

Author: Antonio Reyes

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-10-13

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1441134204

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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

Published: 2007-03-13

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780809327508

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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

Published: 2014-03-03

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1623490448

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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.

Voice and Equality
Voice and Equality

Author: Sidney Verba

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1995-09-26

Total Pages: 668

ISBN-13: 9780674942936

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This book confirms the idea put forth by Tocqueville that American democracy is rooted in civic voluntarism—citizens’ involvement in family, work, school, and religion, as well as in their political participation as voters, campaigners, protesters, or community activists. The authors analyze civic activity with a massive survey of 15,000 people.

Vernacular Voices
Vernacular Voices

Author: Gerard A. Hauser

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 1643362860

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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.