Unit name | 'The Rise of Political Lying'?: Rhetoric from Churchill to Blair (Level H Special Subject) |
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Unit code | HIST30048 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | H/6 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
Unit director | Dr. James Freeman |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | Department of History (Historical Studies) |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Rhetoric is often dismissed as ‘mere words’, the means by which cynical politicians and their advisers manipulate public opinion or tell the truth ‘economically’. Indeed, many historians’ approaches to rhetoric reflect these popular assumptions: they judge politicians’ rhetoric against the reality of policy action or sift through inspiring words to excavate the hidden agendas and ideologies underlying a speech.
In this unit, we will partner archival research with digital methods to question both popular attitudes and historical approaches to rhetoric. By tracing the evolving themes and forms of oratory and propaganda in post-war British politics, we will ask whether it is instead possible to see rhetoric as a necessary part of vibrant democracies with a history of its own.
Rather than reading the period connecting Churchill’s rhetoric with Blair’s as one in which respectable oratory descended into ‘spin’, we will examine how politicians could be alert to the techniques of persuasion and yet unable to escape their own rhetorical visions. Similarly, we will complicate narratives of change and continuity by asking how far new technologies and changing formats, such as television and the political interview, transformed rhetoric and whether or not these made politics more democratic.
Focussing on key rhetorical episodes, we will use archival sources including strategy briefs, speech drafts and speakers’ guides to contextualise politicians' oratory and re-evaluate central interpretations of post-war British politics. We will also widen our analysis to consider a related aspect of rhetoric, such as a trope, technique or medium, and ask how this can be studied over a longer chronology. In doing so, students will engage with rhetorical theory, experiment with digital technologies developed by corpus linguists to examine language at scale, and connect their findings to existing historiographies.
The unit aims, therefore, to encourage students to question popular and academic perceptions of rhetoric, whilst building their confidence in using interdisciplinary, digital research methodologies to critique existing historical narratives.
On successful completion of this unit students will be able to:
1 x 2 hour seminar per week
3,500 word essay (50%) and a two-hour exam (50%).
<font face="Calibri" size="3">Judi Atkins and Alan Finlayson et al (eds.), Rhetoric in British Politics and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); </font> <font face="Calibri" size="3">Laura Beers, 'Whose Opinion?: Changing Attitudes Towards Opinion Polling in British politics, 1937-1964', Twentieth Century British History, 17, 2 (2006), 117-205; </font> <font face="Calibri" size="3">Jon Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); </font> <font face="Calibri" size="3">Richard Toye, A Short Introduction To Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).</font>