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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial">Colleagues, if you are still considering participation in the
SLA meetings and find this panel abstract to be of interest, please contact either
me at <a href="mailto:jfenigsen@gmail.com">jfenigsen@gmail.com</a> or Jim Wilce
at <a href="mailto:Jim.Wilce@gmail.com">Jim.Wilce@gmail.com</a>. We still have a spot open.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial">The
Battle of the Genres: Puffery and Authority in Political Discourse<span></span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial">“Culture wars” that have
been identified as a major factor in transformations of politics around the
world, are routinely linked with conflicts over social, religious, and
political values. This panel, however, focuses on another central arena for
such wars—that of rapidly shifting ethnopragmatics of political discourse in
relation to destabilized conceptualizations of truth, authenticity, and
authority. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial">As liberal-progressives and
populists in the US and elsewhere proclaim, promote, and pursue conflicting
metapragmatic values and interpretive frames for political discourse genres
from full-blown political oratory to comedy and tweets and memes, the generic
boundaries are being shifted and so are the fields of power and authority. The
distinctions between “puffery” and “misrepresentation,” between the “fanciful”
and “descriptive,” long at the heart of judiciary regimentation of commercial
speech (Parmentier, 1994), are now at the center of metapragmatic wars over
authority, wars that entail a sense of mutual alienation among the “citizen
subjects” (Balibar, 2017). <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial">The attribution of authority
and authenticity to discourse framed as unabashedly outspoken and emotional invites
us to revisit ancient Greek philosophers’ concerns over parrhesia — a “free/frank
speech”—and its dangers to democracy as recounted by Foucault (2001), as well
as Foucault’s warnings over the “aristocratic” nature of these concerns. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial">It also invites us to
identify the fluidity of genre-framing cues that mark discourse as interpretable
as “literal but not serious” and its known variations; to examine issues of
truth and turn-taking (Duranti, 2015) in negotiation of authority across
different media; to consider responsibility and evidence in discourse (Hill and
Irvine, 1993). <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial">Balibar, </span><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">Étienne (2017). <i>Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology. </i>Fordham
University Press.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">Duranti, Alessandro (2015). <i>The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in
a World of Others. </i>Cambridge University Press.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">Foucault, Michel (2001). <i>Fearless Speech. </i>Semiotext(e).</span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";color:black"><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial">Hill, Jane H. and Judith T.
Irvine, eds. (1993). <i>Responsibility and
Evidence in Oral Discourse. </i>Cambridge University Press.<span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial">Lempert, Michael and Michael Silverstein (2012). <i>Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency.</i> Indiana University Press.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial">Parmentier, Richard J.
(1994) <i>Signs in Society: Studies in
Semiotic Anthropology. </i>Indiana University Press. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:Arial"> <span></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial">.<span></span></span></p>
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