%0 Journal Article
%T Sharing values to safeguard the future: British Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration as epideictic rhetoric
%A John E Richardson
%J Discourse & Communication
%@ 1750-4821
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/1750481317745743
%X This article explores the rhetoric, and mass mediation, of the national Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) commemoration ceremony, as broadcast on British television. I argue that the televised national ceremonies should be approached as an example of multi-genre epideictic rhetoric, working up meanings through a hybrid combination of genres (speeches, poems, readings), author/animators and modes (speech, music, light, movement and silence). Epideictic rhetoric has often been depreciated as simply ceremonial ¡®praise or blame¡¯ speeches. However, given that the topics of praise/blame assume the existence of social norms, epideictic also acts to presuppose and evoke common values, in general, and a collective recognition of shared social responsibilities, in particular. My methodology draws on the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, given, first, its central prominence in analysing argumentative strategies in discourse and, second, the ways it facilitates a reflexive ¡®shuttling¡¯ between text-discursive features, intertextual relations and wider contexts of society and history. Here, I examine how a catastrophic past is invoked in speech and evoked through image and music, in response to the demands that uncertainty of the future ¡®places upon one¡¯s conscience¡¯
%K Commemoration
%K discourse-historic analysis
%K epideictic
%K Holocaust Memorial Day
%K multimodality
%K rhetoric
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1750481317745743