ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the study rhetoric's cultural features. Cultural criticism helps with the guessing. Culture seeps into all messages; nobody escapes its influences completely. Three features of culture are especially important to study: Values—Deep-seated, persistent beliefs about essential rights and wrongs that express a person's basic orientation to life, Myths—Master Narratives serving as moral guides to proper action. Fantasy Themes—Contemporary stories providing concrete manifestations of current values and hinting at some idealized vision of the future. The chapter explores the rhetoric of Klansmen, magazine authors, Girl Scouts, an aging pig, and a presidential candidate. All embraced values. Each depended on myth. Cultures differ by nationalities, of course, and people of multiple nationalities coexist in the United States. The critic is sensitive to this. Yet arguments written into the Declaration of Independence more than 240 years ago by Thomas Jefferson remain largely unifying.
