By outlining and integrating three different perspectives - discourse, rhetoric and social theory - this book provides a comprehensive and well-illustrated framework for the analysis of everyday texts. The first part of the book describes the tools and resources which can be drawn from discourse analysis, rhetorical theory, and social theory. These perspectives are then brought together in an extensive analysis of everyday texts. The last chapter examines the principles and consequences of conducting theoretically informed critical textual analysis.

In this perceptive analysis, Dana Cloud traces the replacement of social and political activism by the pursuit of personal, psychological change. She identifies the new movement as the rhetoric of therapy, where a persuasive cultural discourse that applies concepts such as coping and adapting replaces active attempts to reform flawed systems of social and political power. Cloud focuses on the therapeutic discourse that emerged after the Vietnam War and links its rise to specific political and economic interests.

Critical case studies identify the extent to which therapeutic discourses...

This book demonstrates how an understanding of the fundamental principles of communication will help in evaluating the effects, effectiveness, truthfulness, and ethics of every kind of communication from traditional soapbox speeches to reading a magazine, talking to a friend, watching court proceedings, or television news. Jodi R. Cohen's informally written, critical guide introduces classical theories of rhetoric at the beginning of each chapter, then expands the discussion with contemporary postmodern theories, and concerns such as aesthetics and cultural bias. There are...

Issues such as lesbians and gay men serving openly in the military, same-sex marriage and the inclusion of sexual orientation in anti-discrimination and hate crime laws have evolved along with the rival progay and anitgay communities. As a result of public policy debates, the U. S. progay movement has moved toward an essentialist, non-sexual identity while traditionalists have shifted toward a secular public self-representation. This book analyzes the internal disagreements within the two movements.

Thoroughly embedded in postmodern theory, this book offers a critique of traditional conceptions of the liberal arts, exploring the challenges posed by cultural diversity to the aims and methods of a humanist education. Janet M. Atwill investigates a neglected tradition of rhetoric, exemplified by Protagoras and Isocorates, and preserved in Aristotle's Rhetoric.

This tradition was rooted in the ancient sophistic and platonic conceptions of techne, or productive knowledge, that appears both in literary texts from the seventh century B.C.E. and in medical and technical treatises from the...