The Drama as Rhetorical Critique: Language, Bodies, and Power in Angels in America

Abstract

This article broadens rhetoric’s scope by reclaiming a space for it in drama. It reviews rhetoric’s bodily beginnings in theatre to read contemporary plays, specifically Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, as rhetorical critique. As critique, Angels enacts the relationship among language, bodies, and power via Kushner’s dramatizing of the metaphoric constructions of AIDS and ideology. The play also performs the disruption and resignification of discourses that marginalize peripheral bodies on the sociopolitical stage. Consequently, Angels adopts a sophistic approach to rhetorical critique that demonstrates language’s mutability.

Notes

1. ¹I thank RR Reviewers Jeffrey Maciejewski and Mark Gellis for their critique. I especially thank my mentor, Jennifer Andrus, for her tireless assistance, as well as Theresa Enos and those at RR for publishing this article.

2. ²Stephen Olbys Gencarella and Phaedra C. Pezzullo’s 2010 Readings on Rhetoric and Performance collects foundational texts of those exploring these intersections.

3. ³See Phillip Harding, “Comedy and Rhetoric”; John Poukalos, Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece; Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity; Thomas Hubbard, “Attic Comedy and the Development of Theoretical Rhetoric”; David Sansone, Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric.

4. ⁴Seminal texts include Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism; Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, Rhetorical Bodies; Jonathan Alexander, Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies; as well as Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language and Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece.

5. ⁵Like me, Hawhee’s preoccupation with the rhetorical/aesthetic body spans both ancient and modern rhetorical contexts. See Bodily Arts.

6. ⁶UK advertising constructed the HIV virus as the “tip of the iceberg”—implying something far more ominous, and unseen to come.

7. ⁷I have coopted this term from Dwight Conquergood’s “Rethinking Ethnography.” For Conquergood knowledge acquisition is truly affective if somatically experienced (348).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fiona Harris Ramsby

Fiona Harris Ramsby is Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing at Bloomfield College, New Jersey. This article constitutes a part of her dissertation, Theory in the Body: Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage.