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History Versus Film: An Examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Rhetoric and Ava DuVernay's Selma

Meadows, Bethany
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=auhonors1493777011073985

Abstract Details

, Bachelor of Arts, Ashland University, English.
Ava DuVernay, director of Selma (2014), altered Paul Webb’s original screenplay in several ways. While critics of the film usually discuss DuVernay’s depictions of President Lyndon B. Johnson, critics have not yet focused on the changes, both subtle and significant, to all of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historical speeches that had to be rewritten because the film did not receive the rights. This forced DuVernay to create speeches in the spirit of King’s in regard to his appeal to the audience’s sense of justice and ideals of freedom, and to establish a rhetorical call-to-action for the contemporary audience. To compare the differences in orations between history and film, I conducted the rhetorical analyses using the Neo-Aristotelian, or Traditional, approach. The editor of Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action, Jim Kuypers, defines this approach as “focused on the three modes of proof identified by Aristotle, (logos, ethos, and pathos), which broadly speaking defined rational argument, appeals to credibility, and rhetoric that produced an emotional response.” While other speeches and writings of King, such as “I Have a Dream” or “Letter from Birmingham,” are usually studied extensively, the speeches this capstone examines have not had as much attention. I perform rhetorical analyses on King’s historical “Our God Is Marching On!” speech, the film’s version of “Our God Is Marching On!,” the film’s original song “Glory” based on King’s references and allusions in his speeches, King’s historical “Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance” speech, and the visual rhetoric of the “Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance” speech All of these works both by King and DuVernay not only revolve around the proficient use of logos, ethos, and pathos, but also around archetypal metaphors of war, rising light, and darkness. In this capstone, I found that even though both versions were rhetorically similar due to the use of archetypal metaphors, which appeal to the audiences’ ideals of freedom, sense of hope and of justice, they were different in their establishment of agency, imagery, diction, and syntax. I concluded that these differences should be attributed to the need to appeal to a twenty-first century, contemporary audience.
Maura Grady, PhD (Advisor)
Linda Joyce Brown, PhD (Committee Member)
Christopher Swanson, PhD (Committee Member)
99 p.
African American Studies; African Americans; Black History; Film Studies; Rhetoric
rhetoric; Neo-Aristotelian rhetoric; archetypal metaphors; language; Selma; Martin Luther King Jr; Ava DuVernay; Our God Is Marching On; Nobel Peace Prize; Civil Rights Movement; film studies; African Americans

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Citations

  • Meadows, B. (2017). History Versus Film: An Examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Rhetoric and Ava DuVernay's Selma [Undergraduate thesis, Ashland University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=auhonors1493777011073985

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Meadows, Bethany. History Versus Film: An Examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Rhetoric and Ava DuVernay's Selma. 2017. Ashland University, Undergraduate thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=auhonors1493777011073985.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Meadows, Bethany. "History Versus Film: An Examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Rhetoric and Ava DuVernay's Selma." Undergraduate thesis, Ashland University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=auhonors1493777011073985

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

auhonors1493777011073985
© 2017, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Ashland University Honors Theses and OhioLINK.