Description

This study is the culmination of a dec­ade of work that began with the contro­versial article, “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision,” which was recently honored by the Speech Communication Association with the Charles H. Woolbert Research Award in recognition of “scholarship of exceptional originality and influence.”

With the publication of this long-anticipated book, Bormann offers new insights into the development of Ameri­can thought and the related social pro­cesses of intellectual history and small group communication as well as rheto­rical criticism. To accomplish this he studies religious and reform speaking in the United States from the time of the Puritans to the Civil War.

Not attempting to survey all of the varied practices of preaching and reform speaking, he isolates, describes, and criti­cizes one rhetorical tradition, starting with the Puritan sermon and moving through the emergence of revivalism to the rise of the antislavery reform efforts and culminating in the speeches of Abra­ham Lincoln. He thereby presents for the first time an integrated and structured account of one rhetorical tradition in this country. Of perhaps equal interest to rhetorical critics are Bormann’s research procedures as he presents the first book-length study to utilize fantasy theme analysis.

About the Author

Ernest G. Bormann is a professor emeritus in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. His many books include Effective Small Group Communication, The Process of Presentational Speaking, Communication Theory, and Forerunners of Black Power: The Rhetoric of Abolition.

Praise For…

“Bormann’s research has been prodigious, and his descriptions are fascinating.  He has located little-known resources and from them is able to provide such vivid details (of the Methodist circuit riders and the camp meetings, for example) that it is almost possible for the reader to share in the fantasy themes. The Force of Fantasy is a tour de force, a remarkable explication and application of a critical system in an important historical period.  It reveals a serious humanistic critic at work explaining another way of looking at human communication, producing new insights into our past and a better understanding of how humans cope with reality.”

“Bormann is at his best when discussing the rhetorical themes and techniques of individual orators and when sketching the communication styles of Puritan and revivalist preachers.  There is, for example, no better statement about the artistry of Jonathan Edwards’s classic sermons than Bormann’s judgment that they ‘deserve to be studied and appreciated as rhetorical artifacts just as Hamlet might be studied as the highest expression of Elizabethan drama.’  Nor is there a superior summary of the stylistic changes in Abraham Lincoln’s speeches from the 1830s to the 1850s.  As the magnum opus of fantasy theme analysis, Bormann’s study deserves wide reading and close scrutiny.”—Rhetoric Society Quarterly