| Intertextuality is the notion that, in any given text, aspects of other texts are present. This is because rhetors always recontextualize elements of other texts when producing their own discourse. Importantly, in this process of recontextualization, rhetors inevitably transform those other texts. They alter meanings, add new evaluative inflections, and, ultimately, implicate and (re)position putative audiences.;Such intertextual transformations are the subject of my dissertation. Broadly speaking, I locate a major rhetorical event in its wider intertextual context, examining how a political address was reported---and repurposed---by journalists. Specifically, I analyze the ways journalists transformed aspects of Colin Powell's 2003 presentation at the United Nations as they precontextualized and recontextualized his speech in their own multimodal news narratives. Focusing on 24 hours of pre- and post-speech news, I examine how journalists intervened upon Powell's address---predefining and redefining his speech, and prepositioning and repositioning audiences to respond to it. The study surveys a variety of news media (television, newspaper, Internet), and systematically integrates several methodological approaches (critical, rhetorical, discourse-analytic, and multimodal). My central argument is that the journalistic texts tend to legitimate Powell and his rhetoric, representing his case as maximally warrantable---and even adding new "evidence" to support Powell's claims.;The project makes a methodological contribution by illustrating how rhetorical criticism can be bridged with other approaches to discourse analysis. More importantly, this dissertation offers new procedures for analyzing a rhetorical event in relation to a set of temporally concurrent (inter)texts, and suggests the inadequacy of studying any rhetorical event in isolation. I argue that the micro-transformations that occur as rhetors pre- and recontextualize a discursive event have a cumulative effect that may drastically alter what a text comes to mean for rhetorical audiences. Ultimately, a call-to-arms speech made by a political figure may not even be as relevant to public decision-making about war as its pre- and reincarnations in the press. Thus, scholars of rhetoric and discourse studies should seek to adopt an intertextual analytic focus that accounts for these small transformations across texts as well as the role these transformations play in implicating and repositioning audiences. |
