Letter versus Spirit

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Camper
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Textual Meaning

Chapter 4 turns its attention to the stasis of letter versus spirit. Traditionally, this stasis has been understood as pitting the exact words of a text against the author’s intent, but the chapter expands the notion of spirit to include other animating forces of textual meaning, such as an overarching principle of interpretation brought by readers to the text. The chapter shows how both the letter and spirit of a text can be divided, with arguers disputing the text’s real versus apparent letter or the author’s real versus apparent intent. To demonstrate how arguers construe authorial intention for their own ends, the chapter analyzes the controversy during the 2008 presidential campaign over the “God damn America” sound bite extracted from a sermon preached by Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s then-pastor. Critics dismissed Wright’s defense of his intentions, pointing to the sermon’s exact wording as evidence of his, and by extension Obama’s, anti-Americanism.

Motivational underpinnings of support for radical political leaders

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Grzymala-Moszczynska ◽  
Katarzyna Jasko ◽  
Marta Maj ◽  
Marta Szastok ◽  
Arie W. Kruglanski
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Hillary Clinton ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Personal Significance ◽  
Political Candidate ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Willingness To Engage

In three studies conducted over the course of 2016 US presidential campaign we examined the relationship between radicalism of a political candidate and willingness to engage in actions for that candidate. Drawing on significance quest theory (Kruglanski et al., 2018), we predicted that people would be more willing to make large sacrifices for radical (vs. moderate) candidates because the cause of radical candidates would be more personally important and engagement on behalf it would be more psychologically rewarding. We tested these predictions among supporters of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders. Our findings were in line with these predictions, as the more followers perceived their candidates as radical, the more they viewed leaders’ ideas as personally important, gained more personal significance from those ideas, and intended to sacrifice more for the leader.

Arguing over Texts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Camper
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
Textual Meaning

Arguing over Texts presents a rhetorical method for analyzing how people disagree over the meaning of texts and how they attempt to reconcile those disagreements through argument. The book recovers and adapts a classification of recurring types of disagreement over textual meaning, invented by ancient Greek and Roman teachers of rhetoric: the interpretive stases. Drawing on the rhetorical works of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Hermogenes, the book devotes a chapter to each of the six interpretive stases, which classify issues concerning ambiguous words and phrases, definitions of terms, clashes between the text’s letter and its spirit, internal contradictions, applications of the text to novel cases, and the authority of the interpreter or the text itself. From the dispute over Phillis Wheatley’s allegedly self-racist poetry to the controversy over whether some of Abraham Lincoln’s letters provide evidence he was gay, the book offers examples from religion, politics, history, literary criticism, and law to illustrate that the interpretive stases can be employed to analyze debates over texts in virtually any sphere. In addition to its classical rhetorical foundation, the book draws on research from modern rhetorical theory and language science to elucidate the rhetorical, linguistic, and cognitive grounds for the argumentative construction of textual meaning. The method presented in this book thus advances scholars’ ability to examine the rhetorical dynamics of textual interpretation, to trace the evolution of textual meaning, and to explore how communities ground their beliefs and behaviors in texts.

Systemic Hybridity in the Mediation of the American Presidential Campaign

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Chadwick
Keyword(s):  
Data Gathering ◽  
Real Space ◽  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Newspaper Coverage ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Power Resources ◽  
Electoral Outcomes ◽  
Media System ◽  
Common Purpose

Chapter 7 continues the revisionist approach of chapter 6, but paints the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign on a broader canvas. Through a detailed analysis of key episodes in the mediation of the campaign, the chapter shows how the real-space spectacles of candidate appearances continue to generate the important television, radio, and newspaper coverage that remains so crucial for projecting the power of a candidate and conveying enthusiasm, movement, authenticity, and common purpose to both activists and nonactivists alike. The chapter discusses how these television-fuelled spectacles now also integrate with newer media logics of data-gathering, online fundraising, tracking, monitoring, and managed volunteerism. A major theme running through this chapter is the growing systemic integration of the internet and television in presidential campaigns. It also shows how the hybrid media system can shape electoral outcomes by providing new power resources for campaigns that can create and master the system's modalities.

Intentionalist Strategies of Interpretation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Stock
Keyword(s):  
David Lewis ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Gregory Currie ◽  
Ordinary Case ◽  
Unreliable Narration ◽  
Fictional Truth

This chapter addresses the complaint that extreme intentionalism standardly forces the reader who engages in interpretation to posit private, or hidden, authorial intentions, for which she has little or no evidence. It is first argued that there are no automatic strategies of interpretation of fictional content: at every stage, whether or not a given interpretative strategy is to be appropriately applied depends on the presence of relevant authorial intention as a sanction. (This section includes a discussion, and rejection, of the views of David Lewis and Gregory Currie about fictional truth; a discussion of the relevance of genre to fictional content; and a consideration of the issue of unreliable narration for an intentionalist view.) The foregoing material on strategies of interpretation is then used to show that it is false to think of the extreme intentionalist as being committed to ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ meanings in the ordinary case.

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Siraganian
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Legal Analysis ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Citizens United ◽  
Corporate Personhood ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Creative Writers

Long before the U.S. Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely “speak” with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This book offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood. The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning—on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms—still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments (corporate intention, pro versus con), modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, the chapters analyze legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.

Selective Exposure to a Presidential Campaign Appeal

1974 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothy L. Barlett ◽  
Pamela B. Drew ◽  
Eleanor G. Fahle ◽  
William A. Watts
Keyword(s):  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Presidential Campaign
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