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A Few Words on the Inaugural Address

By RR | January 25, 2009

On Inauguration Day, my Literary Responses to War class looked at Obama’s address and found examples of parallelism–the repetition of syntactical structures, typically used for a grand or elevated rhetorical effect. Like most ceremonial political speeches, it was loaded with parallelism, though the structures were more deeply embedded and less obvious than some political speeches. We also found a nice abstraction (the heroes of Arlington whispering through the ages) to describe the less-than-pleasant idea of dying for your country in war.

Others have looked at the speech as well. The most interesting analysis thus far is from the literary critic and Times editorialist Stanley Fish. Fish argues that Obama’s speech is intended to be read as much or more than heard: the speech, he suggests, is really a series of statements rather than a broader, more cumulative argument:


Barack Obama’s Prose Style
NY Times January 22
Stanley Fish

There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”

The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you’re looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you.

Of course, no prose is all one or the other, but the prose of Obama’s inauguration is surely more paratactic than hypotactic, and in this it resembles the prose of the Bible with its long lists and serial “ands.” The style is incantatory rather than progressive; the cadences ask for assent to each proposition (“That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood’) rather than to a developing argument. The power is in discrete moments rather than in a thesis proved by the marshaling of evidence.

Complete article

Another interesting commentary came from NPR. John McWhorter, a linguist, argued that Obama’s cadence was uniquely African-American–and the speech marks the first time black English vernacular dialect occured at such a high level of discourse. You can hear the full interview here.

Taken together, these analysis show Obama blurring lines again, this time between written and spoken English. Obama relies on paratactic structures that demand close textual reading, but he speaks in a cadence that reflects an oral tradition.

This is going to be a fun President to watch.

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