| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation examines how contemporary political television programs model American citizenship through the portrayal of political leaders and how these models of citizenship constitute American national identity. To understand how popular television rhetorically functions for a modern audience, I examine three specific texts: Netflix’s House of Cards, HBO’s Veep, and CBS’s Madam Secretary. Relying on Charland’s conception of constitutive rhetoric, Fisher’s narrative paradigm, and Dow’s model of rhetorical criticism, I conduct a rhetorical analysis examining citizenship and identity. House of Cards models American citizenship through identification by antithesis in that the show asks the audience to identify collectively in antithesis to the values carried by Frank and Claire Underwood, thereby constituting Americans as virtuous, or truthful. Veep constitutes Americans as compassionate and competent, which are directly linked; it also constitutes Americans as feminine. Madam Secretary constitutes Americans as protectors of the American way of life, which is operationalized through a Family Values ideology. This dissertation provides an important link between how political discourse rhetorically functions constitutively in American citizenship and public identity, and how popular culture both reflects and constructs rhetorics of reality. | en |
