Discursive Practices and Rhetoric in Barack Obama's State of the Union Addresses (original) (raw)

The volume Discursive Practices and Rhetoric in Barack Obama’s State of the Union Addresses focuses on the seven State of the Union Addresses the former US President delivered during his eight years at the White House. The aforementioned corpus is approached in an interdisciplinary manner, while the research incorporates elements pertaining both to political communication and to discourse analysis; the target audience includes a wide range of potential readers, such as politicians, political campaign advisors, sociologists, political analysts, journalists, but also people aspiring to pursue a career in these fields, students in Political Sciences, Social Sciences, Jounalism, Diplomacy, International Relations or Philology. The effects of Barack Obama’s seven selected speeches go beyond the contribution they made to building the statesman’s image during his years in office, to conferring legitimacy upon him and to winning over national and international audiences; their influence extends long into the future, where Obama will have made history, being remembered by generations to come as the first black president at the White House, the American dream come true or, in other words, the triumph of the impossible. Out of all his public appearances, out of all his discourses, of which there are many, the State of the Union Addresses stand out due to their immediate and powerful impact on public opinion, their ability to convey an impressive outline of the most important issues on the public agenda and, last but not least, their strong emotional and inspirational potential; for all these reasons, the State of the Union Addresses transcend the borders of space and time, constituting a significant part of the Obama legacy.