#15 - JRL 7019
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003
From: "Marilyn J. Young" <myoung@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>
Subject: Announcing the Second Issue of Controversia
I am pleased to announce that the second issue of Controversia is published and available. It arrived here just before the holiday break. The Contents of the Volume 1, number 2 are as follows:
Articles:
Governing Balkanization: Liberalism and the
Rhetorical Production of Citizenship
Ronald Walter Greene
Kevin Douglas Kuswa
The rhetorical globalization of Balkanization and its particular domestication in the United States points to the need to perform a "post-national" rhetorical analysis. Such analysis accounts for the argumentative process by which domestic problems get coded through frames provided by other parts of the world. This essay analyzes how the metaphor of Balkanization works as a rhetorical element in the "hygienic government" (Berlant) of U.S. public culture. Our contention in this paper is that the argumentative work being done by the metaphor of Balkanization sanitizes U.S. public culture by cleansing political controversies embedded in the racial and imperial history of the nation. In so doing, the metaphor of balkanization produces a form of American exceptionalism that imagines the United States as the exemplar of democracy displacing its own history of ethnic cleansing so as to offer itself as a model for other nations.
We'll Guarantee Freedom When We Can Afford It: The Free Market, the Russian
Constitution, and the Rhetoric of Boris Yeltsin
James A. Janack
This essay highlights the discrepancies between the Constitution that Russian President Boris Yeltsin proposed in a speech in June 1993 and the actual Constitution that Yeltsin's team drafted and the Russian electorate adopted six months later. The apparent inconsistencies between the speech and the constitution are explained through an analysis of Yeltsin's speeches in 1993 and 1996. Drawing on Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad, the essay argues that Yeltsin's discourse emphasized scenic aspects in the form of economic conditions. The analysis of Yeltsin's rhetoric at important points in Russia's democratic development, the Constitutional drafting process and the 1996 presidential campaign, suggests that the Russian president's discourse conceptualized a democracy in which democratic acts were enabled by a prosperous market economy rather than constitutional guarantees.
Forum: Debate and Democracy-Building
Introduction
Marilyn J. Young
David Cratis Williams
Debate and Democracy
David Zarefsky
Argument and Environmental Advocacy
J. Robert Cox
The Blooming of Balkan Public Debate
Gordon R. Mitchell
Debate, competition, and democracy: a gaming perspective
Alfred C. Snider
Book Reviews
Social Movements, Civil Society, and Radical Adult Education,
by John D. Holst.
Reviewed by Joseph P. Zompetti
Cooperative Argumentation: A Model for Deliberative Community, by Josina M.
Makau and Debian L. Marty
Reviewed by Cindy L. Griffin
Creating a Democratic Civil Society in Eastern Germany: The Case of the
Citizen Movements and Alliance 90, by Christiane Olivo
Reviewed by Kati Hannken-Illjes
By Popular Demand: Revitalizing Representative Democracy through Deliberative
Elections, by John Gastil. Berkeley
Reviewed by David Droge
Pros and Cons: A Debater's Handbook, 18th ed., edited by Trevor Sather
Reviewed by Joe Bellon
The Greene/Kuswa essay as well as the Forum essays appear in both English and
Russian; the remainder is in English only.
Marilyn J. Young, Ph.D.
Wayne C. Minnick Professor of Communication
Dept of Communication - 1531
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306
Office Tel: 850-644-8757; fax: 850-644-8642
Home Tel: 850-562-8671; fax: 850-562-8717
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