Analyzing Constitutive Rhetorics: The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions and the ‘Principles of ‘98'

• In Event: Stability and Change in Public Address Research

Abstract

The paper describes two paths of constitutive analysis: an interior path that seeks to unpack a text’s invitations or the way a text attempts to position readers and audiences in order to reconstruct its constitutive vision and an exterior path that traces a text’s circulation in order to reconstruct its constitutive legacy. The authors illustrate these two analytic paths through an extended discussion of Virginia’s 1798 Resolutions (originally drafted by James Madison) and Kentucky’s Resolutions (originally drafted by Thomas Jefferson).

Authors

• James Jasinski, Univ of Puget Sound

• Jennifer Mercieca, Texas A&M University