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This study analyses Magdalena Andersson´s speech "Tal till nationen" wich was broadcasted on March 1st, 2022, 8.01pm on SVT due to the Russian armed attack on Ukraine and the detoriorating political security situation in Sweden. The purpose of this study is to investigate how a Swedish prime minister communicates with the nation in a time of crisis, with focus on the linguistic elements of rhetoric.  The study will be carried out with the help of rhetorical text analysis, which means that the speech is transcribed to be analyzed as a text. The rhetorical text analysis has been carried out in four steps. The analysis begins with ensuring the context and rhetorical situation of the speech, followed by an analysis of the disposition of the speech. The analyze continues by individual analyzes of the Prime minister´s use of ethos, pathos, and logos. Finally, the analysis concludes by examining the style of the speech.  The result of the study shows that Magdalena Andersson, in her speech, communicates with the nation through her position as a prime minister to calm the nation. To achieve this, she has created a simple communication with clear messages as well as a diligent use of ethos, pathos, and logos.

In his first term as president, George W. Bush was confronted with one of the worst national attacks in United States history: the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001. Through the devastation, however, President Bush triumphed in unifying and guiding this nation during what would become the height of his rhetorical leadership. Following his reelection in 2004, President Bush faced one of the worst natural disasters in the nation's history: Category 4 Hurricane Katrina. In its aftermath, Katrina became known as "one of the worst mishandled disasters ever." Utilizing Kenneth Burke's pentad, this study analyzes the president's rhetorical response and the primetime network news coverage following each crisis in an attempt to determine how President Bush could fare so well in one instance, consoling and leading the American people, while falling short in his second major crisis during his term as president. / Master of Arts

From September 19th through October 3rd, 2008, Congress debated the largest government bailout in America history—the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA). Those sixteen days generated a vibrant conversation regarding the nature and severity of America’s economic crisis and the proper role of government in responding to such juggernauts. In this dissertation I explore the rhetoric generated by this bill and its context in hopes of illuminating the more general role of rhetoric in mitigating and exacerbating crises in capitalism. My hypothesis is that, in a global capitalist economy increasingly dependent on immaterial production (i.e., finance, the Internet, mass media, etc.), economic crisis rhetoric has become as essential to economic order as monetary and fiscal policy. To explore this claim, I focus on two key rhetorical tensions that drove much of the crisis rhetoric produced. The first of these battles is a rhetorical struggle over the spatial delineation between Wall Street and Main Street, while the second is a conflict between Keynesianism and neoliberalism in a rhetorical contest over the values of government interventionism. By analyzing a variety of policy and expert discourses that constitute the parameters of these discrete areas of debate, I argue that all rely on moral and ethical appeals to substantiate their meaning and validity. At the same time, I contend that these discourses are indebted to logics of institutional form and therefore cannot be abstracted from the financial and political contexts in which they reside. This insight leads me to forward a new theory of economic crisis rhetoric called the economic imaginary. By beginning with real economic events and then taking into account the discursive and extra-discursive forces that “overdetermine” its mediated understanding, the economic imaginary offers us a more empirical and cartographic account of how economic rhetoric actually operates in society. / text