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In:Let's talk politics: New essays on deliberative rhetoric
Edited by Hilde Van Belle, Kris Rutten, Paul Gillaerts, Dorien Van De Mieroop and Baldwin Van Gorp
[Argumentation in Context 6] 2014
► pp. 171–184

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The Bridge

the rhetorical construction of Barack Obama’s biography by David Remnick

Published online: 30 April 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aic.6.10van
Barack Obama’s early public speeches were inherently and totally ‘rhetorical’. Obama used to find the perfect balance between logos, ethos and pathos, and (re)created the dream of American people engaged in solving problems and creating a community. He appealed to the belief in change that can a.o. be achieved by the art of speaking well. In this paper, I will show how Obama’s biographer David Remnick presents his subject as a living example of the rhetor. I will also show how the biography is structured around the general idea of rhetoric as a humanistic project. I will discuss the strength and problems of this approach, along with Remnick’s romantic notion about the arc of civil rights history and his urge to report on the election of the first black president.
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Santulli, Francesca & Chiara Degano
2022. The Presidential Announcement: Building Agreement on Disagreement. In Agreement in Argumentation [Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 31], ► pp. 89 ff. DOI logo

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