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"This module covers a 250 year history of nationalist oratory in Ireland. It may be regarded as a survey of Irish nationalist history from a rhetorical perspective, treating both the techniques and tropes used by generations of orators seeking to define the trajectory of Irish nationhood as well as the contexts that permitted such oratory its efficacy and resonance.
The module will examine the theory of political oratory and its role in creating a new concept of “civic virtue” across Europe in the eighteenth-century. It will consider the establishment in the nineteenth-century of a sense of continuity and legacy associated with intergenerational cross referencing of “great speeches”.
As speeches become printed and anthologised, they achieve a relevance beyond the immediate context of their first performance and create instead a form of imagined community which enables readers to imagine themselves as part of an engaged crowd, a political collective.
The gendering of this oratorical tradition will be considered in terms of ideals of masculinity and femininity enshrined in terms of an ideal of republican masculinity alongside a highly feminised stock of patriotic images.
Finally, the module will consider whether the craft of oratory remains relevant in twenty-first century Ireland and the possible technologies and media that may perhaps serve to disseminate and preserve the tradition of the crafted political speech.
Indicative Texts:
Cicero: Philippics
Edmund Burke: Speeches on India
Henry Grattan: Selected Speeches
John Mitchel: Jail Journal
Padraig Pearse: Selected Speeches
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ORATING THE NATION
