Release date: Aug. 31, 2004 Course Explores Politics as Theater
Contact: As Republicans and Democrats go full throttle against each other to win the hearts of American voters, Emory University students in the course "Why all the Controversy? Rhetoric, Culture and the 2004 Election" are paying close attention to the drama, and analyzing the "scripts" each party follows to get across its messages. Instructor Antonio de Velasco created the course with the 2004 election in mind as the perfect "theater" to observe and analyze the dramatic symbolism used in politics. "This course analyzes the political spectacle were seeing right now and how messages are simplified for political effect. While symbolic imagery can be overlooked as an important dimension of American politics, it is those sound bites and images that shape political debate and become the issues that people talk about," says de Valesco, a doctoral candidate in Emory's Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. The reading list includes authors from the far right, such as Ann Coulter's "Liberal Lies about the American Right," and the hard left with Joe Conason's "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth." Students also will read books on the effects of the media, and use the Internet, newspapers and television to track current events. For a final paper, students will write a "citizen narrative" to describe what it was like to follow the election, and make sense of the messages. "I want students to be equipped with a basic understanding of the rhetorical strategies that give political messages such cultural force in the United States. My hidden agenda, actually, is to get them deeply interested in politics so that they will become better and more sophisticated political critics," he says. Other courses this fall that will use the national presidential election as a teaching tool include: Political Science 100: National Politics in the US Political Science 347: The South in National Politics Political Science 348: American Elections and Voting Political Science 490S: U.S. Presidential Campaigns History 488: JR/SR Colloquium: American Conservatism since 1945 For more political news, visit Emory's election news page. ###
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