Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, one might have begun an essay about the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric by lamenting the dearth of scholarship on the subject. Today, no such lamentations are needed. The past decade has seen an explosion of interest in the way pragmatism and rhetoric can profitably inform each other. Offering everything from formulations of pragmatist rhetorical theory (Mailloux 1998; Schollmeier 2002; Danisch 2007; Crick 2010) to explorations of pragmatist methodology in the study of rhetorical (...) texts (Stroud 2009a; Stroud 2010) to analyses of what individual pragmatists have contributed to the history of rhetoric (Asen and Brouwer 2003; Asen 2003; Finnegan 2003; Greene 2003; Stob .. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we utilize a rhetorically grounded textual analysis to study the Open Letter, the first publicized text sent out from the Central government to all the Party and Communist Youth League members on 25 September 1980. By reading through the text, we identify three individual figures – the ‘people’ as ‘the origin of problems,’ the people as ‘reasonable and considerate,’ and those charged with advocating compliance as ‘active propagandists and responsible educators’ – that have been crafted in the (...) text. We argue that by constructing three subject positions that served to identify the people via both language and social practices, the Central government in China after Mao Zedong’s death constructed the discourses of urgency and necessity of adhering to the one-child policy to both convince and compel people to exercise responsibility in having only one child. (shrink)