Product Description: Chapters by Thomas W. Benson, Ronald V. Bettig, Jennifer L. Borda, Jeanne Lynne Hall, Susan Mackey-Kallis, Martin J. Medhurst, Shawn Parry-Giles, Trevor Parry-Giles, Brian J. Snee, Roger Stahl, Robert E. Terrill.The Rhetoric of the New Political Documentary was awarded the Bruce E...read more

Product Description: Format Paperback Subject Literary Collections Publisher Kessinger Pub Co

Product Description: Following the dramatic Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, President John F. Kennedy moved to repair the damage the invasion had done to his image and to his relations with the press. Thomas W. Benson examines two speeches and a press conference held by JFK in the days after the crisis, shedding light on how the structures of speech writing influence the texts of the speeches and policy formation, as well as the ways the press mediates and even helps to formulate presidential rhetoric...read more

No book on documentary film has ever analyzed in such detail the work of a single filmmaker. In impeccable close readings of his films, Tom Benson and Carolyn Anderson explore how Frederick Wiseman has elaborated his widely admired sensibility.A special feature is an extended chapter on the legal difficulties encountered by Wiseman’s first documentary, Titicut Follies, an unflinching depiction of conditions in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts took Wiseman to court, seeking to prevent the exhibition of Titicut Follies. In New York State, three judges refused to issue an injunction against the film. In Massachusetts, the film was the subject of a sensational series of legislative hearings and a court trial, in which the principals gave very different stories of the conditions and terms under which the film had been negotiated and produced.Wiseman, himself an attorney, exchanged charges and countercharges with Massachusetts Attorney General Elliot Richardson, and the controversy split the civil liberties community. Judge Harry Kalus, calling Titicut Follies "a nightmare of ghoulish obscenities," not only ruled for the Commonwealth but ordered that the film be destroyed. On appeal, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court modified the Kalus ruling, allowing the film to be seen only by professional audiences. Titicut Follies became the only American film whose exhibition is restricted for reasons other than obscenity or national security.After Titicut Follies, Wiseman went on to become a major independent documentary producer. Many of his films have been shown on public television in the United States and at film festivals around the world. The films are widely admired and often highly controversial. Wiseman has developed a unique cinematic rhetoric that draws from both the documentary and fiction traditions to describe American institutions: a high school, basic training, a monastery, a juvenile court, a primate research center, a welfare agency, the Panama canal zone, and a department store. Benson and Anderson scrutinize each of these films, record the reactions of some of his subjects and audiences, and present the heretofore neglected contributions of his four cinematographers: John Marshall, Richard Leiterman, William Brayne, and John Davey. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: The critical study of public address has changed in the twentieth century and will continue to evolve in the twenty-first. As the studies in this volume demonstrate, methodological pluralism is the standard of contemporary work, and active rhetorical critics today are more consciously aware of the theoretical implications and extensions of their work than were their critical forebears...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book is an anthology of landmark essays in rhetorical criticism. In historical usage, a landmark marks a path or a boundary; as a metaphor in social and intellectual history, landmark signifies some act or event that marks a significant achievement or turning point in the progress or decline of human effort...read more

Product Description: A case history of the only American film under court-imposed restrictions for reasons other than obscenity or national security.Titicut Follies is an excoriating depiction of conditions in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, a prison-hospital for the criminally insane...read more

Product Description: Nine fresh views of the interconnections of historical, critical, and theoretical scholarship in the field of American rhetoric.Stephen T. Olsen addresses the question of how to determine the disputed authorship of Patrick Henry’s "Liberty or Death" speech of March 23, 1775...read more

Product Description: Rhetoric -- the theory of oral discourse -- affected and indeed pervaded all aspects of classical thought. Bearing the stamp of its impact were the Homeric hymns, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Aeschylus' Eumenides, the great dramatic tragedies, the elegiac and lyric poetry, and the literature of the Romans, often formed in the Greek image...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Prepared to celebrate the 75th anniver­sary of the Eastern Communication Association. Benson commissioned these original essays with the idea of defining the state of the art through addressing what is “worth knowing and asking about speech communication for the 1980s and 1990s...read more