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Chief Command’s Various Kinds of Rhetoric

A Few Remarks on Selected Cases of Leader Speech

Summary/Abstract: The article is an attempt to define the role and genre property of various leader speeches in contemporary culture, their rhetoric functions and situational involvement. The comparative material are here fragments of so-called great speeches in history delivered by Hitler, Stalin, J. F. Kennedy, John Paul II, all of which serve as a starting point to refer to the speeches of contemporary politicians—Donald Tusk and Jarosław Kaczyński. The essay also includes the communicational practices of the Fascism (Language of the Third Reich) and the Polish variant of newspeak elaborated on by Michał Głowiński—the leader’s binding mode of communication with the society in the time of the Polish People’s Republic. Leader speeches is an applied literary genre, deeply involved into a situation, and changeable according to the political culture which the speaker represents. Such speeches, both the old and the contemporary ones, create the patterns of political speaking and strengthen some kind of rhetoric strategies. Additionally, they mark an important space of living speech quite commonly regarded as determined by a graphic (written) sign and an image.

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