D&C Richardson Epideictic rhetoric.pdf (1.21 MB)
Sharing values to safeguard the future: British Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration as epideictic rhetoric
journal contribution
posted on 2017-09-22, 08:19 authored by John RichardsonThis article explores the rhetoric, and mass-mediation, of the national Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) commemoration ceremony, as broadcast on British television. I argue that the televised national ceremonies should be approached as an example of multi-genre epideictic rhetoric, working up meanings through a hybrid combination of genres (speeches, poems, readings), author/animators and modes (speech, music, light, movement and silence). Epideictic rhetoric has often been depreciated as simply ceremonial “praise or blame” speeches. However, given that the topics of praise/blame assume the existence of social norms, epideictic also acts to presuppose and evoke common values in general, and a collective recognition of shared social responsibilities in particular. My methodology draws on the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, given, first, its central prominence on analysing argumentative strategies in discourse and, second, the ways it facilitates a reflexive ‘shuttling’ between text-discursive features, intertextual relations, and wider contexts of society and history. Here, I examine how a catastrophic past is invoked in speech and evoked through image and music, in response to the demands that uncertainty of the future “places upon one’s conscience” (Lauer 2015:12).
Funding
Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Discourse and CommunicationVolume
14Issue
2Citation
RICHARDSON, J.E., 2017. Sharing values to safeguard the future: British Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration as epideictic rhetoric. Discourse and Communication, 12 (2), pp.171-191.Publisher
SAGE © The AuthorVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-09-15Publication date
2017Notes
This paper was published in the journal Discourse and Communication and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481317745743ISSN
1750-4813eISSN
1750-4821Publisher version
Language
- en