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Waco Decade: A Rhetorical Study of Commemorative Discourse
Author: Chris Eisenhart
Degree: Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Carnegie Mellon University, 2003
This study is a rhetorical analysis of how texts written by different authors,
in different genre, enter into a common commemorative process. I use discourse
analysis to study a variety of accounts of the Waco conflict from 1993.
My central question is: What can we learn about commemoration through a case study
of commemorative accounts of Waco.
In response to this question this study offers the following kinds of contribution:
I consider uses of commemoration other than the design of public memorials,
the paradigm cases of commemoration. In Chapter 1, I discuss the potential for
studying non-paradigmatic commemorative texts. I argue that the analyses throughout
demonstrate the ways commemorative accounts participate in a commemorative process
that complicates the apparently univocal quality of the monument as the paradigm
case of commemoration.
I consider what these commemorative accounts are doing from the micro-rhetorical
level of linguistic choice to the macro-rhetorical level of discursive practice.
This work focuses on how commemorative accounts represent what happened at Waco,
as the means to argue for who or what is responsible for Waco, and, what changes
in action, attitude, or policy are necessary in light of Waco. The discussion
of this analysis runs throughout the central chapters.
I consider commemoration at the level of social process by looking across
the individual discursive practices and texts. This theme emerges through the
course of the dissertation, culminating in Chapter 5, in which I discuss the
interaction among these commemorative accounts of a controversial event.
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