As set out in its introductory chapter, Frank Austermühl's book argues that US presidential utterances constitute a ‘complex intertextual phenomenon’ (p. 7)—a ‘scaffold’ or framework on which each speech builds, and which contributes in turn to the construction and consolidation of identity at three levels: individual, institutional, and national. Austermühl's approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on American cultural studies, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, political studies, presidential studies, rhetoric, sociology, and theories of intertextuality. Combining previous taxonomies—notably by the literary theorist Gérard Genette—the author identifies ten different kinds of intertextuality, reducing them to five for analytical purposes and devoting a chapter each to three of them, with two in another. The data consists of inaugural US presidential addresses and State of the Union speeches from 1789 to 2008, together with major foreign and security policy speeches after 1945.
Chapter 2 examines discursive intertextuality (textual, syntactical, and grammatical patterns). It includes statistical trends for pronoun use, readability, text-, sentence-, and word-length, type-token ratios, and the use of ‘god’ terms, ‘devil’ terms, and the word people, charting the shift to a popular, ‘imperial’ presidency. A section on generic intertextuality is largely a discussion of earlier work by the rhetoricians Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Chapter 3 offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of thematic intertextuality, basing the qualitative analysis on judgements of intensity made by two graduate assistants.
Chapter 4, dealing with hypertextuality, gives a detailed sequential analysis of George W. Bush's ‘Axis of evil’ speech, seen as exemplifying the use of an us-vs.-them ‘hypotext’ or template. (Confusingly, Genette's distinction between an original hypotext and subsequent hypertexts is extended to include rhetorical and organizational patterns under the heading of hypertextuality, rather than argumentative topoi.) Unsurprisingly, the author argues that the us-vs.-them template is a common feature of US presidential foreign and security policy discourse. More importantly, he identifies seven ‘building-blocks’ of this discourse, underlining the importance of understanding the us-vs.-them template from an international relations perspective and suggesting that the US needs an opposing Other to maintain its unity.
Chapter 5 uses a typology developed by Udo Hebel to examine ‘material’ intertextuality—allusions to past presidents, historically significant place names, and ‘sacred’ texts such as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Such allusions are said to create a halo effect, helping to make the President the high priest of what the sociologist Robert Bellah has called America's civil religion. The concluding chapter 6 provides a summary which shows that ‘the combined discourse of American presidents represents a multifaceted textual universe’ (p. 276), which contributes ‘significantly and continuously to the definition of what it means to be an American’ (p. 278).
Although heavy going at times, the book is a valuable synthesis of research in a number of fields and will be of obvious interest to a range of readers. Its appeal for sociolinguists, however, may be limited by the fact that (as the author himself acknowledges) it does not take account of the social, economic, and political contexts of individual speeches.
