Sheckels provides the first book-length study of Congressional
debating. The limited work on the topic in the communication
discipline has argued that such debating is tedious and
inconsequential. Sheckels, however, offers a new paradigm, derived
from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, that counteracts this assumption.
This paradigm also counters the often unvoiced assumption that
debates are inherently biopolar with the initial premise that they
are instead polyphonic. The polyphony, however, goes beyond the
recognition of the multiple speakers who participate and the drama
they enact, to the awareness of the voices these speakers introduce
within their discourse. These voices range from the words of
authorities to the narratives of average Americans, from classical
prosopopoeia to what Bakhtin terms stylization. Speakers also
sometimes enact what Bakhtin terms double-voiced discourse;
furthermore, there are moments of what Bakhtin terms carnivalesque
energy. Bakhtin's work finally alerts the critic to the illusion of
finalizability in Congressional debates.
After outlining this paradigm, Sheckels uses it to examine six
Congressional debates, ranging in date from a 1960 Senate
filibuster on a civil rights matter to the 1999 House debate on
articles of impeachment and includes analyses of such flash points
as the Confederate flag, sexual harassment in the military, and
partial-birth abortion. These case studies reveal both the utility
and the flexibility of the Bakhtinian perspective. Thoughtful
analyses that will be of great interest to scholars and researchers
involved with rhetoric and political communication.
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