Cognitive rhetoric: the cognitive poetics of political discourse

Intro -- Cognitive Rhetoric -- Editorial page -- Title page -- Editorial page -- Table of contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of figures -- 1. Preliminaries -- 1.1 Introduction -- 1.2 Political discourse -- 1.3 Political/Critical Discourse Analysis -- 1.4 Classical rhetoric -- 1.5 Stylistics -- 1.6 Cognitive stylistics -- 1.7 Summary of aims and methods -- 1.8 The structure of this book -- 2. Layers of ethos -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 Ethos, ethics and narrative theory -- 2.3 Three layers of ethos -- 2.4 The implied author in political discourse -- 2.5 The narrator - The orchestrator -- 2.6 The speaker/s -- 2.7 Summary -- 3. The conceptual ecology of ethos -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 The cognitive dynamics of impression formation -- 3.3 From dialect to style -- 3.4 From style to cognition -- 3.5 Performance models -- 3.6 Character schemata -- 3.7 Reading political minds -- 3.8 Summary -- 4. Logos as representation -- 4.1 Introduction -- 4.2 Common ground and the enthymeme -- 4.3 (Mind) modelling and the Idealised Common Ground -- 4.4 A (Cognitive) Grammar of Resistance -- 4.5 Re-specifying and resistant reading -- 4.6 Re-scoping and resistant reading -- 4.7 Re-profiling, re-scanning and resistant reading -- 4.8 Irony as resistance -- 4.9 Summary -- 5. Logos as conceptual mapping -- 5.1 Introduction -- 5.2 Mapping and example -- 5.3 Metaphor and/as example -- 5.4 Resisting example -- 5.5 Satire as example -- 5.6 Politics in The Thick of It -- 5.7 The Thick of It in politics -- 5.8 Summary -- 6. Rhetorical ambience -- 6.1 Introduction -- 6.2 Affect and emotion -- 6.3 Emotion in Political Discourse Analysis -- 6.4 Ambience -- 6.5 Tone -- 6.6 Atmosphere -- 6.7 Rhetorical ambience -- 6.8 Ambience and affect in immigration rhetoric -- 6.9 Summary -- 7. Political resonance -- 7.1 Introduction -- 7.2 Political resonance -- 7.3 An attentional model

This book sets out a framework for investigating audience responses to political discourse. It starts from the premise that audiences are active participants who bring their own background knowledge and political standpoint to the communicative event. To operationalise this perspective, the volume draws on concepts from classical rhetoric alongside contemporary research in cognitive stylistics and cognitive linguistics (including schema theory, Text World Theory, Cognitive Grammar, and mind-modelling, amongst others). It examines the role played by the speaker's identity, the arguments they make, and the emotions of the audience in the – often critical – reception of political text and talk, using a diversity of examples to illustrate this three-dimensional approach – from political speeches, interviews and newspaper articles, to more creative text-types such as politicised rap music, television satire and filmic drama. The result of this wide-ranging application is a holistic and systematic account of the rhetorical and ideological effects of political discourse in reception.