On Rhetorical Personae and Identification

From "Balancing Mystery and Identification: Dolores Huerta's Shifting Transcendent Persona" by Erin F. Doss* & Robin E. Jensen, Quarterly Journal of Speech Volume 99, Issue 4, 2013


Rhetorical Personae and Identification

The concept of a rhetorical persona has a long scholarly history. Its title derives from the masks worn in Greek and Roman theatre to distinguish the actors proper from the characters portrayed. Scholars differentiate between the rhetorical persona and the rhetor's true identity, noting that a persona is a carefully constructed character, “the created personality put forth in the act of communicating.” Edwin Black refers to the rhetor's voice as a “first persona” and delineates a second persona—that of the implied audience—which is communicated via public discourse. Black's second persona inspired scholars to interrogate texts for clues about not only the author and the intended audience but also the discursive effects of subjectivity, collectivity, and the social realities of context. For example, the identification of a third persona—that of the audience discursively neglected or negated—revealed the manner in which individuals or groups not explicitly accounted for in a message can be “objectified in a way that ‘you’ or ‘I’ are not.” Dana Cloud adds to this conceptualization by noting that individuals and groups can negate themselves from a situation via a “null persona” by strategically refusing to respond to issues they deem unspeakable. Relatedly, Charles Morris argues for a fourth persona, which emerges when a rhetor attempts to “pass” as something he or she is not.

These theoretical gains have paved the way for continued focus on personae. Most recently, the idea of a transcendent persona involving rhetors’ appeals to their own boundary-breaking accomplishments has been explicated, but research has yet to discern how contradictory elements of this persona might be successfully balanced. The transcendent persona is both performative and grounded in the specific context into which a rhetor seeks to initiate change. Defined according to three key elements, the transcendent persona (a) draws from a rhetor's boundary-breaking experiences (“this might involve being the ‘first’ or the ‘only’ person to have accomplished something,” or at least the creation of a perception that this is the case), (b) requires the rhetor to both build discursive distance from audience members and maintain identification with them, and (c) is used to introduce an “alternative vision of society” that the rhetor has seen thanks to a transcendent experience. The transcendent persona allows the rhetor to draw from the transcendence of his or her accomplishments and introduce new ideas and modes of communicating to and with audiences. Audiences, in turn, are granted the discursive tools to draw from the rhetor's vision and reframe themselves as capable of bringing about societal transformation.