Choosing Readings with Working with Texts as a Primary Method

White, James Boyd

Human Dignity and the Claim of Meaning: Athenian Tragic Drama and Supreme Court Opinions from Journal of Supreme Court History 27 # 1 (2002)

Explores the link between the classical Athenian tragedy and the Supreme Court opinion in Cohen versus California, a Vietnam war case involving an arrest for obscenity based on an anti-war protest statement on a t-shirt. White is well-known for his style of rhetorical analysis of legal cases as constitutive rhetoric – that is, language that constructs and reflects the culture. This essay thus provides an example of rhetorical analysis that uses the contrast between two different, though White would argue related, texts to make its argument about the significance of the texts themselves and how we ought to understand them.

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Copyright © 2008 Composing Inquiry: Methods and Readings for Investigation and Writing
Last modified: 02/21/08. Contributors to this site include: Margaret Marshall, Andrew Strycharski, April Mann, Isis Artze-Vega, Patty Malloy, John Wafer.