Debating “what out to be”: The comic frame and public moral argument

Since collectivities construct morality codes through public argument, maintaining fair deliberation is a great concern for rhetorical scholars. However society's increasing reliance on technical knowledge as a basis for deciding what “ought to be” has led to the exclusion of substantive community values from public argument. Since the connection of rhetoric to values has been a longstanding scholarly struggle, a variety of rhetoricians have identified modes of argument that ensure their incorporation. In this paper, I examine the possibility of Burke's comic strategies for this purpose through a study of Lisa Crawford's discourse, an activist at the Feed Material Production Center.