Words That Matter: The Significance of "Stories" in Obama's 2008 Election Campaign
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2014.i3.683Keywords:
Barack Obama, Discourse AnalysisAbstract
On November 4, 2008 people all over the world could celebrate the advent of a new era. The election of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th American President was a historic event of immense significance. For the first time in the history of American democracy, an African American was elected President of the United States.
After eight years of policies that had increased military expenditure and broadened the gap between what Obama likes to call “Main Street” and “Wall Street”, the time of the Republican administration was eventually over. Obama was welcomed as the president promising renewal. He was seen as the leader who would move the country ahead and bring about real change in the lives of ordinary Americans. Being young for a person in that role and charismatic, he was capable of awaking American people’s subliminal needs for hope at a time of great uncertainty and economic instability.
References
Bobo, Lawrence and Michael Dawson. “A Change Has Come. Race, Politics, and the Path to the Obama Presidency.” Du Bois Review 6.1 (2009): 1-14.
Capone, Alessandro. “Barack Obama’s South Carolina speech.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010): 2964-77.
Degani, Marta. Framing the Rhetoric of a Leader. An Analysis of Obama’s Election Campaign Speeches, forthcoming.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. Small Stories, Interaction, and Identities. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007.
--- “The Other Side of the Story: Towards a Narrative Analysis of Narratives-in-interaction.” Discourse Studies 8.2 (2006): 235-57.
Hatavara, Mari,Lars-ChristerHydén and Matti Hyvärinen, eds. The Travelling Concepts of Narrative. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2013.
Hunt, Matthew and David Wilson. “Race/Ethnicity, Perceived Discrimination, and Beliefs about the Meaning of an Obama Presidency.” Du Bois Review 6.1 (2009): 173-91.
Kloppenberg, James. Reading Obama. Dreams, Hope and the American Political Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Labov, William. “Some Further Steps in Narrative Analysis.” Journal of Narrative and Life History 7.1-4 (1997): 395-415.
--- Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972.
Lakoff, George. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Obama, Barack. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. New York: Random House, 2006.
--- Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995.
Pettigrew, Thomas. “Post-racism? Putting President Obama’s Victory in Perspective.” Du Bois Review 6.2 (2009): 279-92.
Remnick, David. The Bridge. The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. New York: Knopf, 2010.
Smith, Rogers and Desmond King. “Barack Obama and the Future of American Racial Politics.”Du Bois Review 6.1 (2009): 25-35.
Walters, Ron. “Barack Obama and the Politics of Blackness.” Journal of Black Studies 38.1 (2007): 7-29.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 Marta Degani
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Iperstoria is an Open Access journal.- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 BY-NC License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of their work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. We require authors to inform us of any instances of re-publication.