John Brown Gordon was committed to the mission of national reconciliation.
He knew that the South would have to embrace the North to repair the devastation of
the Civil War. Driven by dedication to public service after the war, he worked
through his positions in governmental offices to help the South. As his public life
slowed he began work on a lecture aimed at making him a peacemaker, a missionary
for reconciliation. His purpose was to provide a broad, nationalistic perspective
which created a common vantage point that would allow both Northerners and
Southerners to derive pride and honor from their participation in the Civil War. The
lecture, "The Last Days of the Confederacy," became very popular in a short period of
time, and made Gordon one of the most requested speakers of the Southern Lyceum
Program and Slayton Lyceum Program.
The purpose of this critical interpretation of Gordon's lecture is to account for
the effectiveness of the rhetorical elements and strategies in the work. The analysis
will be based on Walter Fisher's narrative paradigm. Narratives dominate the content
and structure of speech; narratives provide a way of ordering and presenting a view of
the world through descriptions of a situation - -the act of storytellingthe format
Gordon chose in creating the lecture. After drawing conclusions from application of
the narrative paradigm I will focus on identifying and evaluating Gordon's rhetorical
vision, which is based in Ernest Bormann's fantasy-theme theory. Finally, due to the
synecdochal nature of the narratives I will use Kenneth Burke's four master tropes
literature to fully interpret the various aspects of the narrative, which complements
the initial mission of narrative criticism.
In "The Last Days of the Confederacy," Gordon masterfully uses anecdotes
from his experiences in the Civil War to create narrative sequences, which construct a
strategy of transformative discourse. A typical sequence would start with an
ingratiary tactic in which Gordon, in his eloquent manner, would describe a Northern
character, scene, or theme and juxtapose it to another story from the South. The
purpose of this sequence is to generate irony, creating a dialectic between the two
stories, which, at the surface, seem to be opposed. His third step, then, was to use that
dialectic to point to the commonalities between the North and the South. This he
would do by illustrating an American trait, skill, or value. The result would be a
major theme demonstrating a national value or belief to add strength to his existing
compendium of themes, such as unity, fraternity, and brotherhood - -all tools to salve
the process of reconciliation of conflict with face-saving for both. / Graduation date: 1994
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/35821 |
| Date | 11 June 1993 |
| Creators | Acklin, David R. |
| Contributors | Iltis, Robert |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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