[Linganth] The Battle of the Genres: Puffery and Authority in Political Discourse. SLA meetings Call for Papers

[Janina Fenigsen]

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
jfenigsen at gmail.com or Jim Wilce at Jim.Wilce at gmail.com. We still have a
spot open.



*The Battle of the Genres: Puffery and Authority in Political Discourse*



“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.



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).



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.



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).





Balibar, Étienne (2017). *Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical
Anthropology. *Fordham University Press.



Duranti, Alessandro (2015). *The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a
World of Others. *Cambridge University Press.



Foucault, Michel (2001). *Fearless Speech. *Semiotext(e).



Hill, Jane H. and Judith T. Irvine, eds. (1993). *Responsibility and
Evidence in Oral Discourse. *Cambridge University Press.


Lempert, Michael and Michael Silverstein (2012). *Creatures of Politics:
Media, Message, and the American Presidency.* Indiana University Press.



Parmentier, Richard J. (1994) *Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic
Anthropology. *Indiana University Press.







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