A Few Words on the Inaugural Address

Sunday, January 25th, 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. [...]