The Politics of Public Confession: Expressivism and American Democracy
Open Access
- Author:
- Tell, David
- Graduate Program:
- Communication Arts and Sciences
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 13, 2006
- Committee Members:
- Rosa A Eberly, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Stephen Howard Browne, Committee Member
James Hogan, Committee Member
John L Selzer, Committee Member - Keywords:
- public confession
Augustine
Rousseau
Foucault
Emmett Till
Jimmy Swaggart
James McGreevey - Abstract:
- As a sustained study of the rhetorical assumptions and political consequences of public confession, The Politics of Public Confession: Expressivism and American Democracy engages histories of public confession in order to illuminate the political and rhetorical consequences of our contemporary confessive culture. Part One engages the work of Augustine, Rousseau, and Foucault in order to provide a theoretical calculus with which to evaluate the political consequences of public confession. I argue that the gradual and relatively recent subsumption of public confession into a logic of expressivism has had deleterious political consequences. In particular, I argue that expressivism is a pernicious rhetorical practice because it naturalizes political actions and thereby allows confessants to elide the claims of justice. Part Two moves from theory to criticism and engages three widely disseminated public confessions. I examine first the 1956 confession in the pages of Look magazine to the murder of Emmett Till. In this chapter I chart the consequences of expressivism on American race relations. Second, I engage the nationally televised 1988 confession of Jimmy Swaggart and argue that Swaggart’s expressivist confession functioned to shut down public debate and helped him evade accountability. Finally, I focus on the widely reported 2004 confessions of former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey and argue that, for McGreevey, expressivism naturalized and depoliticized citizenship. In each case study, I suggest that both rhetoric and democracy are impoverished to the degree that confession is subsumed within a rhetoric of expressivism.