The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century

The Unfinished Conversation Dec 05, Gehrke , William M. Lerner , Pat J. Only 2 left in stock more on the way.

Faculty and Staff

The Unfinished Conversation Oct 26, Philosophy of Communication Ethics: Babrow , Isaac E. Olson , Lindsey M. Teaching First-Year Communication Courses: Paradigms and innovations Nca Studies in Communication Jul 26, This title will be released on January 13, Microhistories of Communication Studies: This title will be released on January 2, Only 3 left in stock - order soon. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime.

The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century

Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping.

• Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos Book 1).
• Search form.
• Staying Power Book 14 in the Action! Series.
• Pat J. Gehrke - College of Arts and Sciences | University of South Carolina.
• The Fifth Rule.

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers.

A Review of Gehrke’s The Ethics and Politics of Speech | enculturation

Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century examines the development of communication studies and rhetoric as both a discipline and a practice. Further, Gehrke examines the nature of ethics in speech and rhetoric in order to uncover and interrogate common assumptions, the limits of the field, and the naturalness of those limits.

Gehrke works from a speech communication perspective and uses a historical approach that, while neither claiming to be comprehensive nor authoritative, does investigate and detail the major conflicts, movements, and challenges faced by both rhetoric and speech communication in the twentieth century.

In doing so, Gehrke aims to trace historical thought and to unearth the means by which the perceptions of rhetoric and speech communication have been created. Beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century and with the emergence of speech communication and communication ethics, Gehrke maps the relationships between available models of persuasion and psychological views of mental health common to the era. Later, Gehrke traces the debates over the nature of rhetoric and the ethics of speech communication during the s to s.

Finally, the book ends in the s with the return to the philosophy of speech communications, rhetoric, and how those philosophies inform practice.

Gehrke employs an engaging narrative style along with a heavy emphasis on historical research. Science brought an emphasis on logic and reasoning, and from this emphasis began the drive towards emotional repression in individuals in favor of total rationality and personal mastery. In chapter two, Gehrke begins to examine the changes in those first few decades of the twentieth century, when scholars of speech communication began the movement towards educating citizens to participate in a democratic society.

He examines the roles of educators and the shift in education to public oratory in order to form a politically-concerned citizenry during this era of transition, an era resulting from the connection between participation in a democratic society and education in speech. This connection and commitment to democracy and, in turn, the broadening of the discipline, began a move towards training military and government personnel.

Educators developed programs and courses to train officers during wartime while scholars examined the use of speech as an act of force. As such, Gehrke examines the role of the difficulties in speech communications education and the use of force—particularly in the case of Adolf Hitler—as an easy entrance into the discussion of ethics and politics as the field struggled to balance the education of a moral character and the whole person during the years surrounding and including World War II.

Resources for:

Gehrke chronicles the rise of rhetoric to prominence in post WWII America in his third chapter, outlining four major themes: This ethical crisis had roots in the influence of European existentialism and the perceived absurdity of the human experience. Such a crisis led naturally to rhetoric scholars seeking out an ethic for rhetoric and to the second theme: Rhetoric, then, would come to largely replace psychological principles as the course of ethics within speech communication.

Rhetoric, in response to the identity crisis of existentialism, developed into an era of Neo-Aristotelian revival in which rhetoricians sought a means of persuasion without a reliance on social sciences. Rhetoric, with a new sense of its own significance, would then begin to delve into an existential crisis of what makes rhetoric, rhetoric.

A Review of Gehrke’s The Ethics and Politics of Speech

Not an easy task. Citing such communication scholars as Karlyn Campbell and William Hesseltine and rhetoric scholars such as Kenneth Burke, Gehrke explores these ontological questions to both uncover the innate essence of humanity as doing so was directly connected to understanding the nature of persuasion and to define exactly what rhetoric and speech communications, as fields, should be doing. Answers provided by scholars during this era are few in number; however, they agree a definition of rhetoric should be concerned with the question of ethics and politics if only because doing so does not provide any conclusive answers and thus should be studied extensively.

This indeterminacy and ongoing inquiry raised the status of rhetoric as a discipline, as it highlighted the power and nature of what rhetoric could do—what it should do—naturally.