The jeremiad and Jenkin Lloyd Jones

Abstract

Speakers themselves within a speech sometimes suggest standards by which a rhetorical critic might at least partially evaluate that speech. In his speech, “Who is Tampering with the Soul of America?”, Jenkin Lloyd Jones suggests a cluster of images, a set of related rhetorical roles, that a critic usefully can employ to analyze the workings of this speech. Through direct statement and indirectly through word choice, Jones assumes the rhetorical roles of a “calamity howler” and an evangelist in the genre of a secular jeremiad. First the tradition of the American Puritan jeremiad and the characteristics of the contemporary secular jeremiad are traced. Then Jones's speech is analyzed as a “paradigm case” to further illuminate the nature of the contemporary secular jeremiad. Significant dimensions examined are: (1) internal and external evidence of Jones's self‐chosen role of Jeremiah, evangelist, and calamity howler; (2) invocation of the Puritan heritage and the American Dream; (3) value appeals and condemnations typical of the jeremiad genre; (4) stylistic creation of “presence” (5) use of historical and contemporary examples; and (6) intertwining of lamentation and optimism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.