Rhetorical Republic: Government Representation in American Politics

by Frederick M. Dolan (Editor), Thomas Dumm

Rhetorical Republic brings together some of the most imaginative theorists from the fields of politics and literature to reflect on how practices of representation in popular culture, the news media, and the law have come to constitute the primary instruments of political governance in the United States. The editors argue that today the struggle over the representation of politics is at least as important as the struggle over power as it has been traditionally conceived. Discussing topics as diverse as Ronald Reagan's nose and its role in the Iran/Contra scandal, the impermanence of the trope of national security, and the prospect for a reembodied liberalism, Rhetorical Republic surveys the American scene with creativity and rigor. The result is an unprecedented analysis, critique, and prescriptive study of the United States as a postmodern polity in which attention to representation, in the broadest and most heterodox sense of the term, is fundamental to understanding American governance.

Hardcover

First published July 1, 1993

About the author

Frederick M. Dolan, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley and Professor of Humanities at California College of the Arts. His primary interests are the relationship of modern political theory to the philosophical tradition and its critics, modernity and post-modernity, the worldly dimensions of imaginative literature, Western religious and spiritual discourses, American political theory, philosophy, literature, film, hermeneutics, and aesthetics.