Rhetorical versus dialogic staging: 'our moment is now', or the discourse that made a president

Resumen

As Barack Obama’s two terms of office draw to a close, this study returns to a decisive speech of the 2008 campaign, one that has received relatively little attention but begs examination because of the decisive role it played. The speech was delivered at the Jefferson Jackson fundraising dinner, during the Democratic primaries, in November 2007. It coincided with a turnaround in the polls in favour of Obama, who until then had been lagging well behind Hillary Clinton. In this study, which draws on enunciative pragmatic theory (cf. Angermuller, 2004), I compare Obama’s speech with Clinton’s in order to highlight the specificity of the former. Clinton’s speech conforms to the expected format of the event: it exemplifies Dialogic Staging, which construes the speech as a dialogic event, and is informed by markers typical of interaction, notably a series of questions and answers in which the audience participates via the chanting of a slogan. In contrast, Obama’s speech engages with Rhetorical Staging, in which the roles of speaker and addressee are shifted to another plane: the speaker rises to the status of superspeaker to address a wide-reaching community that transcends the direct addressees and the immediate here-and-now of the delivery; this setup is informed by a staging of the Word, based notably on a high rate of rhetorical figures of speech as opposed to interactive forms, which produces a sublimated form of dialogism. While these two setups are transverse to different types of genres, they prove particularly useful in the analysis of oratory: they represent two distinct approaches to the way the speaker invests the public speaking podium, and also the way the orator negotiates his/her status as a speaker who is called to represent a community in the context of a campaign speech.