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design by Corey Williams |
Looking for the Narrative
There are two broad concerns that exist as fragments of discourse embedded throughout the entirety of President Steger’s response to the murders. For our purposes—finding out the overall public message President Steger presented, these fragments may be combined and read as a composite narrative. This composite narrative is simply the aggregate combination of smaller narratives and the thematic fragments found throughout President Steger’s responses to the murders.[15] President Steger was remarkably consistent with what he said in the 24-hour period following the slayings. His utterances fall into two broad categories: description of events and epideictic concerns.
I read president Steger’s comments chronologically, but also with an eye for their basic structure. In one sense, as I read I conflated his comments into their basic structure, into one narrative reply to the incident. Thus my reading is of the archetypal Steger narrative, a composite narrative. My idea is to understand how president Steger’s voice functioned in setting the tone of interaction following 4/16.
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