Gabrielle Giffords
A Study in Civil Courage
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12465201 |
|---|---|
| Authors | G Thomas Goodnight (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 679-710 |
| Publication date | 2014-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Rhetoric and Public Affairs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1094-8392 • E-ISSN: 1534-5238 |
| Publisher | Michigan State University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.4.0679 |
| OpenAlex | W253569486 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
Gabrielle Giffords survived, recovered, and returned to public life after being badly wounded by an assassination attempt on January 8, 2011. During this extended ordeal, the Arizona representative mobilized lyric, dramatic, and oratorical resources into a singular, untimely rhetoric. I contend that she invoked the cultural resources of Polyhymnia—a classical figure reminding us of the ingenious, contingent resourcefulness among the symbolic arts—to recover her public agency in a time of deep incivility and public violence. In this essay, I find Giffords’s rhetoric, including her appearances, speeches, interviews, testimony, and editorials from 2011 through 2013, to comprise acts of civil courage
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Courage · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Public speaking · Rhetoric · Social science · Sociology · The arts · The Symbolic · Theology · Trial by ordeal · Law · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Social Movements and Cultural Identity
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |