Obama’s Acceptance Speech To The DNC

All the successful rhetorical activities are bound to be dominated by certain rules. The effectiveness of a speech depends on whether the speaker and the audience finally reached a consensus which is the key to find out the rules of successful rhetorical activities.American rhetorician Robert·Scott had put forward the theory of epistemic rhetoric. According to this theory, knowledge or truth should not be deemed as something unchangeable and prior to epistemic activity. Instead it should be regarded as something that is created and acquired constantly from the epistemic context that we are involved in. In other words, knowledge or truth can not be dragged from one to another in rhetoric but is acquainted during interaction. Interaction is a popular topic among rhetoric researchers. Based on this theory, we have found out that interaction plays a major role to reach consensus. This thesis will further discuss interaction in the perspective of epistemic rhetoric and use Obama’s speech to the DNC as a case study aiming to prove that in every successful speech, participants all reach consensus through interaction.First of all this thesis makes a general review of this theory’s developing process and a brief introduction of Scott’s study on this theory. Then it makes a further discussion on the interrelationship between epistemic rhetoric and interaction. What’s more, it discovers the process of interaction and studies the two participants and new form during the rhetorical process in the perspective of epistemic rhetoric. At last, this thesis explores the role of interaction in the perspective of epistemic rhetoric by studying Obama’s speech to the DNC to discover how the speaker and audiences reach consensus in actual rhetorical activity. Through the analysis, we can see that Obama has been successfully elected to a second presidency depends on the rhetorical interaction between him and his audiences. Through interactive, Obama achieved "identification" with his audiences and the audiences identified with his political ideas and recognized his statesmanship. In fact, most of the U.S. audiences do not know politicians that much. Only through the rhetoric of politicians and their dazzling appearance, can they get to know them and understand them. All this relies on the tradition of Western rhetoric. The politicians also know that, in a political speech, to obtain the trust and support from the audience through rhetorical interaction by communicating with them is the key to success.