This dissertation focuses on the contribution of Joseph Addison and his London newspaper The Spectator to the modern "social imaginaries" (Charles Taylor) of public, market and nation. Addison's championing of perspicacity in prose and detachment in aesthetic judgment created protocols of "stranger sociality" (Michael Warner) that made participation in these social imaginaries possible. Addison is placed in dialogue with such figures in philosophy and rhetoric as Cicero, Ramus, Montaigne, Kant, and Machiavelli. The Spectator is the primary text examined, but Addison's juvenilia and political writing are also cited. The Spectator's reliance on a visual paradigm of communication can be interpreted as establishing modernist dogmas with regard to three functions of rhetoric, production, reception and constitution: 1) the transmission model of communication, 2) the detached, impartial nature of the reflective spectator, and 3) the universal underpinnings of the liberal model of citizenship. These modernist dogmas share a visual organizing metaphor: they presuppose a transparency of the communication process in which signification is noise, attachment is bias, and faction is chaos. Addison, it is argued, has a place in the history of rhetoric as an exemplar of a uniquely modern form of eloquence.

Last modified

• 09/06/2018

Creator

• Jon Leon Torn

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N22T6P

Subject

• Communication Studies

Keyword

• social imaginaries
• Joseph Addison
• public sphere
• spectatorship
• history of rhetoric
• British public address

Date created

• 2008-04-29

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright