Visiting Professor of Communication John Adams is the author of a chapter in Rhetorics of Display, Lawrence Prelli, ed., (University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC: 2006). Adams' chapter, "Epideictic and Its Cultured Reception: In Memory of the Firefighters," uses former President Bill Clinton's eulogy of six firefighters killed during a warehouse fire in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a case study. According to the editor's introduction, Adams "shows how epideictic can evoke a civic ethos enabling citizens to find in civic virtue a model of concord amidst the discord of public political life, provided that they are rightly predisposed to acknowledge its 'display' when actually exhibited before them."
The introduction notes: "In Chapter 14, John C. Adams returns rhetorical display to its classical origins in public eulogy in his study of the educational function of epideictic. Central to discharging that function is the display of paradigm cases that manifest concrete instances of widely admired public virtues for the audience's acknowledgment and commemorative observance. Adams stresses that audiences themselves must be predisposed to participate in these celebratory encounters. They must possess the right culturally prompted "linguistic predisposition" to remain open to speech as a vehicle of virtue's disclosure and to the corollary possibility that speakers can offer, without calculation of advantage, guileless testaments to a common sense of loss and to a shared appreciation for the very best qualities of human association. Audiences myopically inclined toward skepticism, if not cynicism, are blind to even the most brilliant illumination of virtue's presence in epideictic display. Audiences open to displays of civic virtues such as courage and sacrifice in behalf of others have potential to find actualized in the "paradigm cases" identification inducing exemplars that transcend the otherwise multiple divisions that permeate so much of public life...".
