Abstract
In Analysing Political Speeches: Rhetoric, Discourse and Metaphor, Jonathan Charteris-Black provides a textbook offering a practical guide to the analysis and interpretation of a particular genre of political discourse: the political speech. The aim of the book is to provide readers with the knowledge and skills to assess the style, structure and persuasive linguistic elements of this important category of contemporary political communication. In doing so, Charteris-Black draws upon both traditional discourse analysis, including classical studies of rhetoric, to more recent approaches of critical discourse analysis. Through detailed and systematic analysis, examples of political speeches –including inaugural Presidential speeches by John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, David Cameron's EU speech of 2013 and Tony Blair's Iraq War speech of 2003 – he illustrates how discourse analysis reveals how language is constructed in successful political speeches to persuade and influence the audience within a specific social and cultural context.
The first part of the book focuses on traditional approaches to discourse analysis, particularly style and structure, while the second part examines and explains more critical approaches that focus on the significance of language to relationships of power, conveyed through features such as agency, modality and fallacy. As a practitioner of critical metaphor analysis, Charteris-Black pays particular attention to the use of metaphor as a persuasive strategic device. The book not only includes extensive illustrative examples, but also exercises and helpful guidance for those wishing to undertake their own discourse analysis research.
The book should be of interest to linguists, students of political and media studies, discourse analysts and speech writers. While it does not seek to provide a practical guide to speech writing, the work adds to a growing literature on the analysis of political discourse. Drawing upon a range of methodological approaches, Charteris-Black demonstrates how different techniques can be applied to empirical analysis to reveal the persuasive elements of political speeches. However, while the examples he provides represent a range of political perspectives, they are drawn exclusively from male British and American political leaders (with the exception of Lt. Col. Tim Collins’ ‘Eve of Battle’ speech, which could be considered tenuously political, and a brief reference to former Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammed Mahathir), which gives the work a rather patriarchal, Western-centric perspective. However, as an insightful introduction to the role and influence of political speeches in contemporary political dialogue, Charteris-Black has made a significant and instructive contribution to the literature.