This project investigates how rhetorical texts influenced the witch trials that were
held in Salem in 1691-1692, how rhetoric shaped the response to this event, and how
rhetorical artifacts in the twentieth and twenty first centuries have shaped American public
memory of the Salem witchcraft crisis. My analysis draws from three different chronological
and rhetorical viewpoints. In Chapter II, I build upon work done by scholars such as
McGee, White, and Charland in the area of constitutive rhetoric to address the question of
how the witchcraft crisis was initiated and fueled rhetorically. Then, as my examination
shifts to the rhetorical artifacts constructed immediately after the trials in Chapter III, I rely
on the tradition of apologia, rooted in the ancient Greek understanding of stasis theory to
understand how rhetorical elements were utilized by influential rhetors to craft a variety of
different explanations for the crisis. And finally in Chapter IV, I draw from individuals
such as Halbwachs, Kammen, Zelizer, and Bodnar, working in the cross-disciplinary field of public memory, to respond to the questions of how we remember the trials today and what
impact these memories have on our understanding of the themes of witchcraft and witch
hunting in contemporary American society. Therefore, this project uses the lens of
rhetorical analysis to provide a method for examining and understanding how individuals,
both in the seventeenth century and today, have engaged in the act of updating their
reflections about this facet of American history.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-05-7936 |
| Date | 2010 May 1900 |
| Creators | Lemley, Lauren |
| Contributors | Aune, James A. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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