The Discourse of Propaganda

Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror

John Oddo

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780271082752
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In the early 1990s, false reports of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait allowing premature infants to die by removing them from their incubators helped to justify the Persian Gulf War, just as spurious reports of weapons of mass destruction later undergirded support for the Iraq War in 2003. In The Discourse of Propaganda, John Oddo examines these and other such cases to show how successful wartime propaganda functions as a discursive process.

Oddo argues that propaganda is more than just misleading rhetoric generated by one person or group; it is an elaborate process that relies on recontextualization, ideally on a massive scale, to keep it alive and effective. In a series of case studies, he analyzes both textual and visual rhetoric as well as the social and material conditions that allow them to circulate, tracing how instances of propaganda are constructed, performed, and repeated in diverse contexts, such as speeches, news reports, and popular, everyday discourse.

By revealing the agents, (inter)texts, and cultural practices involved in propaganda campaigns, The Discourse of Propaganda shines much-needed light on the topic and challenges its readers to consider the complicated processes that allow propaganda to flourish. This book will appeal not only to scholars of rhetoric and propaganda but also to those interested in unfolding the machinations motivating America's recent military interventions.

Table of contents

• COVER front
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Chapter 1: Theorizing Propaganda Intertextuality, Manipulation, and Power
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter 2: The Persian Gulf Warand the War on Terror A Brief History
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Chapter 3: How the Incubator Story Became NewsThe Power of Performative Semiotics
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Chapter 4: Keeping War Fever Alive: The Circulation of the Incubator Story
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Chapter 5: Message Force Multipliers: Rewarding Recontextualization
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Chapter 6: Enacting and Entextualizing the Voice of the Expert
• Notes to Chapter 6
• Chapter 7: The Evolution of a Talking Point
• Notes to Chapter 7
• Chapter 8: Support Our Troops” as Portable Text and Cultural Tradition
• Notes to Chapter 8
• Chapter 9: “Support Our Troops” as Vertical and Horizontal Propaganda
• Notes to Chapter 9
• Conclusion War Propaganda and the Prospects for Resistance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index