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ABSTRACT
This essay uses the occasion of tribute to return to Steve Schwarze’s “Environmental Melodrama” and Gregory Desilet and Edward C. Appel’s later essay representing arguably the most important theoretical engagement with Schwarze’s ideas to date. I identify unresolved dilemmas in the relation between affect, rationality, and rhetoric of resistance emerging from this exchange, and propose a corrective. This article contends that Desilet and Appel offer some insightful critiques of Schwarze’s argument, but that pitfalls in their overall refiguring of melodrama’s affectivity must be resolved if the study of what Schwarze calls melodrama and they term comic-filtered factional framing is to coherently and productively advance.
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Notes
1 Steven Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 3 (2006): 239–61.
2 Gregory Desilet and Edward C. Appel, “Choosing a Rhetoric of the Enemy: Kenneth Burke’s Comic Frame, Warrantable Outrage, and the Problem of Scapegoating,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2011): 340–62.
3 See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000); Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80; Rachel Alicia Griffin, “I AM an Angry Black Woman: Black Feminist Autoethnography, Voice, and Resistance,” Women’s Studies in Communication 35, no. 2 (2012): 138–57; Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993); Theresa A. Kulbaga and Leland G. Spencer, “Outrage Epistemology: Affective Excess as a Way of Knowing in Feminist Scholarship,” Women’s Studies in Communication 45, no. 2 (2022): 273–91; Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Tiara R. Na'puti, “Disaster Militarism and Indigenous Responses to Super Typhoon Yutu in the Mariana Islands,” Environmental Communication 16, no. 5 (2022): 612–29; Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91–111; Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125–51.
4 Schwarze, “Environmental,” 241; on tragic framing, see Kenneth Burke, Attitudes toward History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 37–44.
5 On comic framing, see Burke, Attitudes, 37–44, 167–75.
6 Schwarze, “Environmental,” 243–4.
7 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 343–4; Herbert W. Simons, “Burke’s Comic Frame and the Problem of Warrantable Outrage,” Kenneth Burke Journal 6, no. 1 (2009), https://www.kbjournal.org/content/burke%E2%80%99s-comic-frame-and-problem-warrantable-outrage.
8 Schwarze, “Environmental,” 251; Burke, Attitudes, 37–44; 167–75; quotations from Edward C. Appel, “‘Tragedy-Lite’ or ‘Melodrama’: In Search of a Standard Generic Tag,” Southern Communication Journal 73, no. 2 (2008): 178–94; 182.
9 Schwarze, “Environmental,” 246.
10 Schwarze, “Environmental,”248.
11 Schwarze, “Environmental,” 244.
12 Schwarze, “Environmental,” 244–5; Robert Bechtold Heilman, The Iceman, the Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent: Tragedy and Melodrama on the Modern Stage (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 52.
13 Schwarze, “Environmental,” 256.
14 Appel, “‘Tragedy-Lite’”; Simons, “Burke’s Comic Frame”; Desilet and Appel, “Choosing.”
15 Simons, “Burke’s Comic Frame”; Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 355.
16 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 354 (emphasis in original).
17 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,”346 (emphasis in original).
18 Simons, “Burke's Comic Frame,” article's third paragraph; although recognizing how melodrama may be productive in some forms, Simons asserts that Burke and Burkeans rightfully understand melodrama as a polemical and propagandist “enemy of understanding” to “abhor” for its “excessive simplicity” and demagogic caricatures. These excerpts are from the section “In Praise of the Comedic Approach.”
19 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 358.
20 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 358.
21 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 352.
22 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,”351–2.
23 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 354–5.
24 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 355.
25 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 347; these ideas derive from Appel, “‘Tragedy-Lite,’” who also refers to this as “tragedy-lite,” 189.
26 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 355.
27 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 355.
28 Tarla Rai Peterson, “Holding Out for a Hero,” Environmental Communication 2, no. 1 (2008): 98–101, 99.
29 Robert L. Ivie, “Democratic Dissent and the Trick of Rhetorical Critique,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 5, no. 3 (2005): 276–93; Robert L. Ivie, Dissent from War (Bloomfield: Kumarian Press, 2007), 67–8; Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000).
30 Ivie, “Democratic,” 5–8; Dissent, 5, 5–6, 105–9.
31 In addition to Schwarze, “Environmental,” see Steve Schwarze, “Juxtaposition in Environmental Health Rhetoric: Exposing Asbestos Contamination in Libby, Montana,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 2 (2003): 313–35; Burke, Attitudes, 308.
32 See, for example, Fraser, “Rethinking,” 60–73; Griffin, “I AM,” 139–44.
33 Schwarze, “Environmental,” 251, 250 (emphasis in original).
34 On theoretically overvaluing instrumentalism in protest rhetoric, see Kevin Michael Deluca, “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, Act Up, and Queer Nation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36, no. 1 (1999): 9–21, 9; Ross Singer, “‘I’m Angry Both as a Citizen and a Father’: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Melodramatic Discourse on the Environmental Consequences of ‘Crony Capitalism,’” in Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse, ed. Richard D. Besel and Bernard K. Duffy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 275–99; 292–4; Elizabeth A. Brunner and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Affective Winds, Decentered Knots of World-Making, and Tracing Force,” in The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power, and New Media, ed. Nathan Crick (New York: Routledge, 2021), 156–71, 157–8, 163.
35 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 355.
36 Dichotomizing blandishment from substance may be useful, but it may also be weaponized and play to the favor of powerholders wielding charges of “hysteria.” This includes appeals to “environmentalist hysteria” that dismiss voices violating western normative standards of rational discourse. See M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, “The Discourse of Environmentalist Hysteria,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 1 (1995): 1–19; see also Kulbaga and Spencer, “Outrage,” 273.
37 Plumwood, Feminism, 41–140; DeLuca and Peeples, “From Public,” 128–37; Mignolo, The Darker, 6–19, 77–117.
38 For instance, the literature on climate change framing supports this inversion. See Nan Li and Leona Yi-Fan Su, “Message Framing and Climate Change Communication: A Meta-Analytical Review,” Journal of Applied Communications 102, no. 3 (article 4) (2018), https://doi.org/10.4148/1051-0834.2189.
39 Peterson, “Holding,” 99.
40 Desilet and Appel, “Choosing,” 355.
41 One might also consider that in controversies such as the Flint water crisis, melodrama orchestrated by non-expert activists has been crucial to getting experts involved, generating new evidence, and helping make the evidence publicly meaningful and impactful. See E. Yvonne Lewis and Richard C. Sadler, “Community-Academic Partnerships Helped Flint through Its Water Crisis,” Nature 594, no. 7863 (2021): 326–9.
42 Brunner and DeLuca, “Affective,” 157–8; Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 10.
43 Brunner and DeLuca, “Affective,”157–62. These scholars borrow the affective winds concept and related vocabulary of “intensity” from Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Kevin Michael DeLuca, Elizabeth Brunner, and Ye Sun, “Weibo, WeChat, and the Transformative Events of Environmental Activism on China’s Wild Public Screens,” International Journal of Communication 10, no. 1 (2016): 321–39, 322.
44 Schwarze, “Environmental,” 246, 247, 250.
45 Appel, “‘Tragedy-Lite.’”
46 Burke, Attitudes, 33.
47 Griffin, “I AM,” 139–44; Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–29; Na’Puti, “Disaster,” 612–16, 624; see also Collins, Black, 201–90.
48 Steve Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama: Explorations and Extensions,” Environmental Communication 2, no. 1 (2008): 101–9, 101.