RHETORIC AND THE CONSTITUTIVE CONDITIONS OF POLITICAL ORATORY

The Commemorative Address as a Special Genre of Oratory

Classical rhetoric distinguishes three classes of genre: the judicial (genus iudiciale), the deliberative (genus deliberativum) and the epideictic (genus demonstrativum). According to the ideal-typical classification scheme, judicial oratory is focused temporally on the past, and thematically on justice or injustice, and its function is to accuse or defend. Deliberative rhetoric is associated with the future, thematically with expediency or harmfulness, and functionally with exhorting or dissuading. Finally, epideictic oratory is linked to the present, thematically to honor and disgrace and functionally to praise or blame (cf. Plett 1989, pp. 15f.).

With the exception of Friedhelm Frischenschlager's lecture ‘Austria in a Europe of Solidarity’, delivered before the SPÖ's Zukunftswerkstätte (‘Workshop for the Future’), 1 all the political addresses we analyse in this study were concerned with commemoration and may therefore be attributed to epideictic oratory in a broader sense. However, none of the three classes mentioned above occurs in pure form: the diversity of topics and temporal references usually results in the simultaneous presence of elements from all three oratorical categories within one and the same speech (on the close relationship between epideictic oratory and political speech, see Ottmers 1996, pp. 18–30).

Commemorative speeches are normally delivered on public days of remembrance, which are usually associated with the ‘magic of numbers’ (Huter 1994), and primarily serve to retrieve the past for the present.