TY - JOUR
T1 - The materiality of discourse as oxymoron
T2 - A challenge to critical rhetoric
AU - Cloud, Dana L.
PY - 1994/1/1
Y1 - 1994/1/1
N2 - Recent rhetorical theory has adopted two versions—variously idealist and relativist—of the proposition that discourse is influential in or even constitutive of social and material “reality.”; This idea, which underpins much critical communication scholarship, I am calling the “materiality of discourse hypothesis.”; This essay documents and criticizes the idealism and relativism of the materiality of discourse idea in postmodernist and post‐Marxist rhetorical theories, illustrates the critique with an extended critical analysis of Persian Gulf War news coverage, and defends materialist ideology criticism as an alternative to a critical rhetoric that has become increasingly affirmative of the social order and detached from reality.
AB - Recent rhetorical theory has adopted two versions—variously idealist and relativist—of the proposition that discourse is influential in or even constitutive of social and material “reality.”; This idea, which underpins much critical communication scholarship, I am calling the “materiality of discourse hypothesis.”; This essay documents and criticizes the idealism and relativism of the materiality of discourse idea in postmodernist and post‐Marxist rhetorical theories, illustrates the critique with an extended critical analysis of Persian Gulf War news coverage, and defends materialist ideology criticism as an alternative to a critical rhetoric that has become increasingly affirmative of the social order and detached from reality.
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U2 - 10.1080/10570319409374493
DO - 10.1080/10570319409374493
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0001428745
VL - 58
SP - 141
EP - 163
JO - Western Journal of Communication
JF - Western Journal of Communication
SN - 1057-0314
IS - 3
ER -