Speech Scaffold

The Great American Scaffold

Based on extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses of a corpus of American presidential speeches that includes all inaugural addresses and State of the Union messages from 1789 to 2008, as well as major foreign and security policy speeches after 1945, this research monograph analyzes the various forms and functions of intertextual references found in the discourse of American presidents. Working within an original, interdisciplinary theoretical framework established by theories of intertextuality, discourse analysis, and presidential studies, the book discusses five different types of presidential intertextuality, all of which contribute jointly to creating a set of carefully manipulated and politically powerful images of both the American nation and the American presidency. The book is intended for scholars and students in political and presidential studies, communications, American cultural studies, and linguistics, as well as anyone interested in the American presidency in general.

Treason by Words

Under the Tudor monarchy, English law expanded to include the category of "treason by words." Rebecca Lemon investigates this remarkable phrase both as a legal charge and as a cultural event. English citizens, she shows, expressed competing notions of treason in opposition to the growing absolutism of the monarchy. Lemon explores the complex participation of texts by John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare in the legal and political controversies marking the Earl of Essex's 1601 rebellion and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Lemon suggests that the articulation of diverse ideas about treason within literary and polemical texts produced increasingly fractured conceptions of the crime of treason itself. Further, literary texts, in representing issues familiar from political polemic, helped to foster more free, less ideologically rigid, responses to the crisis of treason. As a result, such works of imagination bolstered an emerging discourse on subjects' rights. Treason by Words offers an original theory of the role of dissent and rebellion during a period of burgeoning sovereign power.

England's blaek Tribunal