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Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 13:3 (2014) ► pp.434–452

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Rhetorical agency in ideological dispute

Party members’ discursive legitimisation of contested political narratives

 | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
Published online: 22 December 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.13.3.03eng
This article explores how non-elitist discourse of members of a political party can be considered as rhetorically well-equipped and ideologically powerful in legitimising a party’s controversial political narrative. By drawing on a well-known contentious political project – the New Labour ‘project’ of the UK’s Labour Party – the article proposes a way for party members’ discourse to be considered for this mode relatively autonomous rhetorical agency. Incorporating conceptualisations and methodologies of rhetorical and discursive psychology, the analysis of Labour Party members’ reflections on New Labour reveals how rhetorical power operates beyond the level of people consistently drawing on particular linguistic or grammatical repertoires. The article concludes that that rhetorical agency is not confined to those with sophisticated access to and knowledge of language’s workings and postulates that discourses of legitimisation may be as characteristic for their contradictions and inconsistencies as they are for their universal principles and grammar-like organisation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Rhetoric as asymmetrically distributed
  • 3.Rhetoric as inherent to discourse in argumentative contexts
  • 4.An epistemological site for rhetorical agency
  • 5.Rhetorical agency at work
    • 5.1New Labour’s justified focus on novelty
    • 5.2New Labour’s necessity to modernise
    • 5.3New Labour’s reliance on spin as apt and legitimate
    • 5.4New Labour is the Labour Party
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
References (35)
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