ACJ Review: Contemporary American Speeches

Volume 4, Issue 2, Winter 2001

Contemporary American Speeches (9th ed.)

Richard L. Johannesen, R. R. Allen, Wil A. Linkugel, and Ferald J. Bryan
Kendall/Hunt: Dubuque, IA (2000)
416 pages
Paperback: $52.95

Reviewed by: Shane Miller, Eastern Illinois University

Editing a textbook of contemporary American speeches is not a task for the faint hearted. Trying to faithfully represent a virtually infinite number of speeches from our recent history in a few hundred pages, and juxtapose those speeches with thought-provoking questions to guide students in their analysis is a task that would make the most steely public address scholars blanche. Yet Johannesen et. al. meet the task, and the result is a public address text that would make an excellent addition to any course that examines contemporary American speech making.

The elements of this book that make it strong are significant. First, and perhaps foremost, is the diversity of speeches the text contains. The forty-two speeches display diversity using any criteria that could be applied: political spectrum, gender, race, or ethnicity. Yet what stood out the most was the diversity of speeches that included not only famous speeches delivered by powerful or important speakers, but the relatively mundane speeches given by everyday people. It is this element perhaps more than any other that shows students the practical relevance and importance that public speaking still manages to hold in a televised, hyperlinked world. That said, it would be nice to see a 10th edition of the book make a greater effort to find more of these wonderful examples of simple, spoken eloquence that still permeate our campus quads, city parks, and protest rallies.

The other prominent strength of this textbook is the series of questions provided by the authors to foster critical analysis. Surely one of the most daunting tasks facing the editors of any such reader is how to stimulate rhetorical questions from students who, in many of the courses likely to use this text, may not have any prior exposure to the critical analysis of speeches. The authors present overall general questions to use in analyzing any public speech, for examining the different genres of speeches that the book treats, and for critiquing the individual speeches within each genre. These questions provide excellent guidance to students as they read through the speeches, as well as offer a strong starting point from which to initiate class discussion of the speeches. A minor critique is that the general questions are presented only once in chapter two, while the questions specific to the genres are only presented at the beginning of each chapter. It would be useful if both sets of questions could be summarized and presented as a list prior to each speech in order to keep all of the questions foremost in students minds as they read the speeches.

Having addressed the strengths of this text, let me briefly speak to some minor issues I have based on using this text within my courses. My first question is whether the authors have over-developed the speech genres they use to organize the book. The authors present six genres of contemporary speeches that they readily acknowledge are not hard and fast divisions. And I would be one of the first to argue that the break from the classic tripartite division of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative genres is refreshing for today's students. Yet the speeches included under the genre that affirm propositions of policy are difficult to clearly separate from the speeches presented in the preceding chapter that create concern for problems. This is more than the simple observation that elements of any one genre are often present in another. Rather, the speeches presented in different genres often seem to possess many of the same qualities and goals as the speeches presented in other chapters.

A second issue is that too many of the speeches are ones for which the majority of students reading the text would not be a rhetorical audience for the speech, in Bitzer's sense of the word. More often than not these speeches seem to be the ones delivered by famous people, but addressing topics and concerns that have no direct impact on the students. My own observations in using this text have been that students respond with much greater interest in and analysis of the speeches that address issues of direct concern to them such as Falwell's speech on abortion or Darcey's memorial to Matthew Shepard, rather than to speeches by Madeline Albright on U.S. and NATO policy in Kosovo.

Finally, my last criticism regards not so much a limitation of the book, as a reflection of my own disappointment with lost potential. I was originally thrilled to see that the 9th edition of Contemporary American Speeches came with a compact disc, believing as I did that the disk contained audio versions of some of the speeches. I was somewhat let down then, when I read that the CD was simply a compilation of transcripts from forty-two speeches saved in PDF format. While the access to such material is certainly nice, I cannot help but feel that the CD would be of infinite more use to students were it to allow them to actually hear some of the speeches contained in the book. In a similar vein, I had hoped that the web site affiliated with the book would provide additional audio copies, or perhaps even streamed video of some of the speeches. It did not. To date (November 15 2000) the site does not archive any speeches in any form, although it promises to at a later date. What the site does provide is a very useful set of links to other web sites featuring speech transcripts, and even in some cases, audio versions of speeches.

Overall, this book is an excellent resource for any instructor looking for a compendium of contemporary American speeches accompanied by useful critical questions. Its timeliness, representativeness, and thoughtfulness move it from beyond a mere compilation of speeches, to a critical exploration of important American dialogue.