Rare is the author who functions as both storyteller and warrior, exerting control over a text and an army, foreshadowing a war and then conducting it. In this dissertation, I focus on four such authors: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and George Walker Bush. Though scholars from various disciplines---history, rhetoric, political science, and literature---have pored over Presidential speeches, examining their provenance, rhetorical heft, and popular appeal, no study has specifically focused on pre-war narratives. Taken together, these narratives reveal striking similarities; each President uses roughly the same plot points: a dastardly enemy attacking, a peace-loving people engaging in conflict, and, finally, Americans vanquishing their evil foe. My dissertation probes the reasons for such similarities, subjecting pre-war addresses to a purely literary analysis and treating Presidents as highly-influential authors.;Using methods adapted from folklorist and structuralist Vladimir Propp, I examine the genesis and morphology of Presidential tales delivered on the eve---or in the early stages---of conflict. I explore how Presidents inserted themselves into the discursive formation of America, how they and their speechwriters formulated monologues, and how such monologues stood at the center of the nation's mythic narrative. By demonstrating the authorial power of politicians, this dissertation seeks to examine literature's imprint on history, inverting the New Historicist notion that history imprints itself upon literature. Ultimately, I argue, pre-war narratives constitute their own category of folktale, beset by an intra-category anxiety of influence, and tied to a rigid set of categorical imperatives.
展开▼
