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Abstract
Ironic texts offer pleasure both as what Burke called “ordinary” and “pure persuasion.” Readers may engage these symbolic dimensions simultaneously, but in different relative proportions. Using the coincidence of the 1986 sentencing of sanctuary movement members and the rededication of the Statue of Liberty, we offer four possible interpretive positions on two ironic political cartoons: optimistic readers interested primarily in the correctives of ordinary persuasion, some of whom politically side with the establishment and others who side with sanctuary; cynical readers interested primarily in the intrinsic symbolic pleasures of pure persuasion; and skeptics who appreciate the appeals of ordinary and pure persuasion in a single text.
Notes
Kathryn M. Olson is Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and Clark D. Olson is Professor at Arizona State University. Correspondence to: Kathryn M. Olson, Department of Communication, P.O. Box 413, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53201. E‐mail: [email protected] authors thank Brian Wismar for his support and Lisa Potter for verifying the essay's quotations. They also thank Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, John Jordan, Takis Poulakos, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on drafts of this essay. An earlier version of a portion of this manuscript was presented at the 1988 Speech Communication Association Convention. A 1987–88 Faculty Research Grant from the University of Alabama–Huntsville supported initial research on the project.
The term “reader” is chosen for simplicity, but it includes all who attend to a symbolic act, whether by reading, viewing, or hearing.
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128–31.
Hall, 131.
Leah Ceccarelli, “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (November 1998): 395–415.
See Barry Brummett, “Rhetorical Theory as Heuristic and Moral: A Pedagogical Justification,” Communication Education 33 (April 1984): 97–107; and John W. Jordan, Kathryn M. Olson, and Steven R. Goldzwig, “Continuing the Conversation on ‘What Constitutes Publishable Rhetorical Criticism?’: A Response,” Communication Studies 54 (Fall 2003): 392–402.
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 172 (hereafter Rhetoric).
Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 34–35, footnote.
The pleasure of pure persuasion depends on the perfection principle in language and symbol users' enjoyment of rhetoric's endless possibilities for compensatory shuttling from unity to division and on to a new unity in Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 16–20. Symbol use persists because humans have an aptitude and an insatiable appetite for it (Burke, Rhetoric, 272, 274, 275, 279).
Burke, Rhetoric, 269.
Burke, Rhetoric, 286.
Burke, Rhetoric, 270.
Burke, Rhetoric, 287.
Burke, Rhetoric, 268–69.
Burke, Rhetoric, 271, 273–74, 275, 291.
Burke, Rhetoric, 294, 269.
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 517.
Although all irony involves perspective by incongruity, not every perspective by incongruity is ironic.
See Burke, Rhetoric, 271.
Peter L. Hagen, “ ‘Pure Persuasion’ and Verbal Irony,” Southern Communication Journal 61 (Fall 1995): 47, 49.
Hagen, 54.
Hagen, 57.
Burke, Grammar, 512.
David Kaufer, “Irony and Rhetorical Strategy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 10 (Spring 1977): 90.
Kaufer, “Irony,” 92.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Richard Harvey Brown, Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 174–75.
The term “intentionalist” is from Linda Hutcheon, Irony's Edge, The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994), 116.
Allan B. Karstetter, “Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Irony,” Speech Monographs 31 (June 1964): 162, 170.
See William R. Brown, “Will Rogers: Ironist as Persuader,” Speech Monographs 39 (August 1972): 183–92; Mark P. Moore, “From a Government of the People, to a People of the Government: Irony as Rhetorical Strategy in Presidential Campaigns,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (February 1996): 22–37; C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts‐Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 207–9; Christopher W. Tindale and James Gough, “The Use of Irony in Argumentation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 20 (1987): 1–17.
Robert J. Fogelin, “Some Figures of Speech,” in Argumentation: Across the Lines of Discipline, ed. Frans H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst, J. Anthony Blair, and Charles A. Willard (Providence: Foris Publications, 1987), 266, 269.
Tindale and Gough, 3; David S. Kaufer and Christine M. Neuwirth, “Foregrounding Norms and Ironic Communication,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (February 1982): 29–30.
Theodore L. Glasser and James S. Ettema, “When the Facts Don't Speak for Themselves: A Study of the Use of Irony in Daily Journalism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 (December 1993): 324.
Helene A. Shugart, “Postmodern Irony as Subversive Rhetorical Strategy,” Western Journal of Communication 63 (Fall 1999): 433–55.
Extensive discussions of irony's features appear in Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Burke, Grammar, 503–17; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 223–39; David S. Kaufer, “Ironic Evaluations,” Communication Monographs 48 (March 1981): 25–38; Norman D. Knox, “Irony,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, vol. 2, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), 626–34; D. C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969); D. C. Muecke, Irony (London: Methuen, 1970); and G. G. Sedgewick, Of Irony: Especially in Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948).
Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 309.
W. R. Brown, 183.
Joachim Knuf, “Ritual and Irony: Observations about the Discourse of Political Change in Two Germanies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (May 1994): 186.
Tindale and Gough, 6.
Karstetter, 177–78.
See, for example, James Stewart Ettema, “Discourse That Is Closer to Silence Than to Talk: The Politics and Possibilities of Reporting on Victims of War,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 11 (March 1994): 1–21; James Ettema and Theodore L. Glasser, “The Irony in—and of—Journalism: A Case Study in the Moral Language of Liberal Democracy,” Journal of Communication 44 (1994): 5–28; Glasser and Ettema, 322–38.
Rick Clifton Moore, “Where Epistemology Meets Ecology: Can Environmental News Reporting Survive Postmodernism?” Mass Communication & Society 2 (1987): 10.
Daniel W. Conway and John E. Seery, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Irony: Essays in Self‐Betrayal, ed. Daniel W. Conway and John E. Seery (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 2.
Karen A. Foss and Stephen W. Littlejohn, “The Day After: Rhetorical Vision in an Ironic Frame,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (September 1986): 329, 333–34.
Booth.
Lisa Gring‐Pemble and Martha Solomon Watson, “The Rhetorical Limits of Satire: An Analysis of James Finn Garner's Politically Correct Bedtime Stories,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (May 2003): 146.
Glasser and Ettema, 334.
Conway and Seery, 2–3.
Robert E. Terrill, “Irony, Silence, and Time: Frederick Douglass on the Fifth of July,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (August 2003): 228.
Terrill, 229.
Terrill, 217.
Terrill, 230.
Terrill, 230.
Terrill, 217.
John Fiske, “Television: Polysemy and Popularity,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (December 1986): 391–408. Ceccarelli argued eloquently for differentiating “polysemy” from more extreme concepts of indeterminate meaning: “[W]ith polysemy, distinct meanings exist for a text, and they are identifiable by the critic, the rhetor, or the audience; with dissemination, meaning explodes, and the text can never be reduced to a determinable set of interpretations.… Polysemy indicates a bounded multiplicity, a circumscribed opening of the text in which we acknowledge diverse but finite meanings” (398).
Celeste Michelle Condit, “The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (June 1989): 106; Dana L. Cloud, “The Limits of Interpretation: Ambivalence and the Stereotype in Spenser: For Hire,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9 (December 1992): 311–24; Gring‐Pemble and Watson, 146. Condit, who inter ‐ viewed two auditors with opposing political views regarding their interpretation of an episode of the television drama Cagney & Lacey that centered on the abortion controversy, contended that few texts are actually “open” or “internally polysemous” in that they “truly offer unstable or internally contradictory meanings”; more often, she continued, texts are polyvalent, meaning “that audiences routinely evaluate texts differently, assigning different value to different portions of a text and hence to the text itself”(108).
Burke, Grammar, 512.
Fiske, 401–2.
Fiske, 394.
Fiske, 392.
Steuart Henderson Britt, Psychological Principles of Marketing and Consumer Behavior (Boston: Lexington Books, 1978), 174. See also Leon Festinger, Conflict, Decision, and Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964); and Maxwell E. McCombs, Using Mass Communication Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979), 347.
Bradley S. Greenberg, “Voting Intentions, Election Expectation, and Exposure to Campaign Information,” Journal of Communication 15 (September 1965): 155. See also John R. Bittner, Fundamentals of Communication (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1985), 227; Edwin B. Parker, Wilbur L. Schramm, Nathan Maccoby, Frederick W. Frey, and Ithiel De Sola Pool, Handbook of Communication (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Ch. 5; and J. Wilson and S. Wilson (Eds.) Mass Media/Mass Culture (New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1998).
Hall, 134.
Hall, 135.
Angela Trethewey, “Isn't it Ironic: Using Irony to Explore the Contradictions of Organizational Life,” Western Journal of Communication 63 (Spring 1999): 152.
David S. Kaufer and Christine M. Neuwirth, “Contrasts Between Ironic and Metaphoric Understanding: An Elaboration of Booth's Observations,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 47 (Winter 1983): 80.
Muecke, Compass, 14.
Claudia Dreifus, “No Refugees Need Apply,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1987, 33.
Dreifus, 32, 35; Colman McCarthy, “Refugees Finding Sanctuary,” Arizona Republic, 9 March 1991, A19.
In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that the INS had been interpreting the asylum provisions of the Refugee Act of 1980 too narrowly. In Ann Crittenden, Sanctuary: A Story of American Conscience and Law in Collision (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 346. Again in 1990, a Federal District court in San Francisco favored Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees by allowing the U.S. State and Justice Departments to settle a lawsuit charging them with discrimination against the Central Americans. In that case, the Central Americans' attorneys successfully argued that “federal officials routinely skirted the Refugees [sic] Act of 1980 by discriminating against Salvadorans and Guatemalans because of ideological bents by Reagan administration officials. The settlement [was] a major defeat for the policies of Elliott Abrams, the former State Department ideologue who oversaw Central American policy” (McCarthy, A19).
Martha Liebler Gibson, “Public Goods, Alienation, and Political Protest: The Sanctuary Movement as a Test of the Public Goods Model of Collective Rebellious Behavior,” Political Psychology 12 (December 1991): 646.
Daniel R. Browning, “8 Sanctuary Defendants Found Guilty; 3 Acquitted,” Arizona Daily Star, 2 May 1986, 1.
Peter Applebome, “Sanctuary Trial Leaves a Political Aftertaste,” op‐ed, The New York Times, 6 July 1986, E5.
Peter Applebome, “3 More Are Given Probation in Alien Smuggling,” The New York Times, 3 July 1986, A15. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco refused to hear an appeal.
Officially titled “Liberty Enlightening the World,” the statue was a gift from France, fashioned by Auguste Bartholdi and erected in New York Harbor. See Robert W. Chambers, “Liberty, Statue of,” in Collier's Encyclopedia, vol. 14 (New York: MacMillan, 1985), 556–57. The statue depicts a woman who has just won freedom; her right hand holds a burning torch, her left hand a book of law inscribed July 4, 1776, and broken shackles at her feet. Gracing its pedestal is Emma Lazarus's 1883 poem “The New Colossus,” originally written and donated for public auction to raise money for the pedestal; although the statue was dedicated in 1886, Lazarus's poem was not added until 1903 and was moved to a plaque at the statue's main entrance only after World War II. See “Emma Lazarus, ‘The New Colossus’ (1883),” in 100 Key Documents in American Democracy, ed. Peter B. Levy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 213–15.
ABC Coverage of Liberty Weekend, 3 July 1986.
Jonathan Yardley, “Lady Liberty? Of Thee I Sing, Sweetheart,” op‐ed, The Washington Post, 10 March 1986, B2.
Yardley, B2.
For an analysis of this choice, see Kathryn M. Olson and Clark D. Olson, “Judges' Influence on Trial Outcomes and Jurors' Experiences of Justice: Reinscribing Existing Hierarchies Through the Sanctuary Trial,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 22 (February 1994): 16–35; and Kathryn M. Olson and Clark D. Olson, “Ideology and Argument Evaluation: Competing Axiologies in the Sanctuary Trial,” in Warranting Assent: Case Studies in Argument Evaluation, ed. Edward Schiappa (Albany: State University of New York, 1995), 155–91.
Peggy Hutchison, “Sentencings,” U.S. v. Aguilar, CR 85‐008 PHX‐EHC (Ariz. District Ct.), 1985–86, 9–10.
Alan C. Nelson, “The Sanctuary Movement: Humanitarian Action, Political Opposition or Lawlessness,” Vital Speeches of the Day, 1 May 1986, 439.
Quoted in Applebome, “3 More,” A15.
James LeMoyne, “Salvadorans Stream into U.S., Fleeing Poverty and Civil War,” The New York Times, 13 April 1986, A1; Crittenden, 345; Eileen Silva Kindig, “Deciding for Sanctuary,” Presbyterian Survey, March 1986, 37.
Kindig, 38.
Crittenden, 345.
Alan Wisdom, “Slowed Sanctuary Movement Sidesteps Facts, Hews to Ideological Line,” Religion and Democracy, February 1987, 5.
“Alien Sanctuary Movement's State Unclear a Year After Court Case,” The New York Times, 7 July 1987, A15; Murray Dubin, “Assessing Sanctuary Verdicts,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 May 1986, C2; Jim Jones, “Sanctuary Trial Won't Kill Effort in Fort Worth,” [Fort Worth] Star Telegram, 2 April 1986; Kindig, 39; Jay Mathews, “The Sanctuary Movement Awaits Judgment,” The Washington Post, 18 April 1986.
Gibson, 634–35.
“Alien Sanctuary,” A15; Applebome, “3 More,” A15; Gene Varn, “5 Sanctuary Members Are Spared Prison Time; 3 Still To Be Sentenced,” Arizona Republic, 2 July 1986, A2.
Crittenden, 349.
Quoted in “Alien Sanctuary,” A15.
“Alien Sanctuary,” A15.
Josh Greenberg, “Framing and Temporality in Political Cartoons: A Critical Analysis of Visual News Discourse,” Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology 39 (May 2002): 186.
William E. Alberts, “Setting at Liberty Those Who Are Oppressed,” op‐ed, Boston Ledger, 1–7 December 1985, 7, 10.
Alberts, 10.
Applebome, “Sanctuary Trial,” E5.
Tom Boswell, “Lady Liberty Would Be Embarrassed,” op‐ed, Milwaukee Journal, 27 February 1986.
Boswell.
Denise M. Bostdorff, “Making Light of James Watt: A Burkean Approach to the Form and Attitude of Political Cartoons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (February 1987): 43.
Fletcher, quoted in Janis L. Edwards and Huey‐Rong Chen, “The First Lady/First Wife in Editorial Cartoons: Rhetorical Visions Through Gendered Lenses,” Women's Studies in Communication 23 (Fall 2000): 369.
Bostdorff, 44.
J. Greenberg, 183–84, 185.
Edwards and Chen, 369.
J. Greenberg, 183.
Bostdorff, 48; J. Greenberg, 186; Graham Knight, “Prospective News: Press Pre‐framing of the 1996 Ontario Public Service Strike,” Journalism Studies 2 (2001): 75; Martin J. Medhurst and Michael A. DeSousa, “Political Cartoons as Rhetorical Form: A Taxonomy of Graphic Discourse,” Communication Monographs 48 (September 1981): 205.
Medhurst and DeSousa, 220, 205.
Medhurst and DeSousa note that “to emerge with any interpretation at all one must consider the image as a whole and react to the interrelationship of the constituent parts. The interpretation of ‘meaning’ which arises from such a consideration is the result of visual montage; the clash of constituent parts to form a coherent whole—the clash of distinctive elements which, in their conflict, invite the reader to perceive an idea that is greater than the sum of its parts” (217–18).
Ernest G. Bormann, Jolene Koester, and Janet Bennett, “Political Cartoons and Salient Rhetorical Fantasies: An Empirical Analysis of the '76 Presidential Campaign,” Communication Monographs 45 (November 1978): 317–29, esp. 319–25.
Cartoon, Sacramento Bee, 1986.
Cartoon, Arizona Daily Star, 4 July 1986, A14.
Roderick P. Hart, “Politics, Television, and Sophisticated Nonsense” (Paper delivered at the Sixth Biennial Conference on Public Address, Iowa City, IA, September 1999), 8–10.
Joseph Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19.
Hart, 10.
Hart, 10.
Bormann, Koester, and Bennett, 324.
Kenneth Burke, Counter‐Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 2.
Cappella and Jamieson, 25.
Hart, 11–12.
Sedgewick, 63.
Kenneth Burke, “On Catharsis, Or Resolution,” Kenyan Review 21 (1959): 341.
Karstetter, 178.
Glasser and Ettema, 323, 335.
Burke, Counter‐Statement, 35.
Burke, Counter‐Statement, 37.
Burke, Counter‐Statement, 30.
Burke, Counter‐Statement, 46.
Burke, Counter‐Statement, 165–66.