Part of
Let's talk politics: New essays on deliberative rhetoricEdited by Hilde Van Belle, Kris Rutten, Paul Gillaerts, Dorien Van De Mieroop and Baldwin Van Gorp
[Argumentation in Context 6] 2014
► pp. 171–184
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
The Bridge
the rhetorical construction of Barack Obama’s biography by David Remnick
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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Verbal and visual rhetoric in a media world
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
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. 
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