Chapter 8
“The state of our Union is strong.” Metaphors of the nation in State of the Union addresses
This chapter discusses the metaphors of the nation used by the last four US presidents (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump) in their annual State of the Union addresses. It is argued that the two main metaphors of the nation used by the presidents, a nation is a building and a nation is a person, are key discursive elements which define the essential ideological characteristics of the nation and constitute a hegemonic concept of national identity. The chapter explains elements of continuity and variation in these metaphorical images in the presidential addresses in terms of the ritual nature of the address and the genre theory of the “New Rhetorics.”
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 2.1The and
- 2.2Nation and metaphor
- 3.Metaphors of the nation in , , and
- 3.1Methodology
- 3.2
Build
- 3.3
America, nation, our country
- 4.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
References
References
Anderson, Benedict
1991 Imagined Communities. 2nd ed. London: Verso.
Bayley, Paul, and Cinzia Bevitori
2015 “
Two Centuries of ‘Security’: Semantic Variation in the State of the Union Address (1790–2014).” In
Gentle Obsessions: Literature, Linguistics and Learning in Honour of John Morley, ed. by
Alison Duguid,
Anna Marchi,
Alan Partington, and
Charlotte Taylor, 60–80. Roma: Artemide.
Beard, Charles A.
1935 American Government and Politics, 7th ed. New York: Macmillan.
Billig, Michael
1995 Banal Nationalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Bougher, Lori D.
2012 “
The Case for Metaphor in Political Reasoning and Cognition.”
Political Psychology 33 (1): 145–163.
Campbell, David
1998 Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson
1990 Deeds Done in Words: Presidential Rhetoric and the Genres of Governance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan
2004 Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan
2005 Politicians and Rhetoric. The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chilton, Paul
2004 Analysing Political Discourse. Theory and Practice. Abingdon: Routledge.
Cohen, Jeffrey E.
1995 “
Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda.”
American Journal of Political Science 39 (1): 87–107.
Cohen, Jeffrey E.
2014 “
Presidential Leadership of the Public Agenda.” Paper prepared for presentation at the 2014 meeting of the American Political Science Association. Accessed 20 February 2017.
[URL]
Dobbins, James
2003 “
Nation-Building: The Inescapable Responsibility of the World’s Only Superpower.”
RAND Review, Summer 2003. Accessed 20 February 2017.
[URL]
Edwards, George C.
1996 “
Presidential Rhetoric: What Difference does it Make?” In
Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency, ed. by
Martin J. Medhurst, 199–217. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
Fairclough, Norman
1992 Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity.
Fairclough, Norman
2001 Language and Power, 2nd ed. Harlow: Longman.
Foucault, Michel
1972 The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books.
Gellner, Ernest
2006 Nations and Nationalism. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Goatly, Andrew
1997 The Language of Metaphors. London and New York: Routledge.
Kovács, Éva
2011 “
The Traditional vs. Cognitive Approach to English Phrasal Verbs.”
Publicationes Universitatis Miskolcinensis. Sectio Philosophica 16 (1): 141–160.
Lakoff, George
1991 “
Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf.” Public paper, 30 January 1991, University of California at Berkeley. Accessed 12 August 2016.
[URL]
Lakoff, George
1996 Moral Politics. How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George
2003 “
Metaphor and War, Again.”
Alternet 17 March 2003 Accessed 12 August 2016.
[URL]
Miller, Carolyn R.
1984 “
Genre as Social Action.”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 70: 151–167.
Miller, Carolyn R.
1994 “
Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre.” In
Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. by
Aviva Friedman, and
Peter Medway, 67–78. London: Taylor and Francis.
Musolff, Andreas
2004 Metaphor and Political Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Musolff, Andreas
2010 Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust: The Concept of the Body Politic. London: Routledge.
Musolff, Andreas
2012 “
The Study of Metaphor as Part of Critical Discourse Analysis.”
Critical Discourse Studies 9 (3): 301–310.
Ng, Sik Hung, and James J. Bradac
1993 Power in Language. Verbal Communication and Social Influence. London: Sage.
Peters, Gerhard
2017 “
State of the Union Addresses and Messages.” The American Presidency Project. Accessed 1 October 2017.
[URL]
Rossiter, Clinton
1956 The American Presidency. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company.
Semino, Elena
2008 Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shogan, Colleen J.
2015 “
The President’s State of the Union Address: Tradition, Function, and Policy Implications.” Congressional Research Service. Accessed 10 January 2017.
[URL]
Smith, Anthony D.
1998 Nationalism and Modernism. A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism. London: Routledge.
Stephenson, Carolyn
2005 “
Nation Building.”
Beyond Intractability,
January 2005 Accessed 25 March 2017.
[URL]
Šarić, Ljiljana
2015 “
Metaphors in the Discourse of the National.”
Družboslovne Razprave 31 (80): 47–65.
Teten, Ryan L.
2003 “
Evolution of the Modern Rhetorical Presidency: Presidential Presentation and Development of the State of the Union Address.”
Presidential Studies Quarterly 33 (2): 333–346.
Thompson, John B.
1990 Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity.
Walter, Jochen, and Jan Helmig
2008 “
Discursive Metaphor Analysis: (De)construction(s) of Europe.” In
Political Language and Metaphor: Interpreting and Changing the World, ed. by
Terrell Carver, and
Jernej Pikalo, 119–131. London: Routledge.
Wodak, Ruth, and Martin Reisigl
2001 Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London and New York: Routledge.
Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart
2009 The Discursive Construction of National Identity, 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Hunt, Sally
2021.
COVID and the South African Family: Cyril Ramaphosa, President or father?.
Discourse, Context & Media 44
► pp. 100541 ff.
Salamurović, Aleksandra
2020.
Metonymy and the conceptualisation of nation in political discourse.
Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 8:1
► pp. 181 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.