2017 Volume 20 Issue 1 Pages 84-99
Focusing on Barack Obama's victory speech at the Iowa Caucus in 2008, I will show by employing a multimodal approach that not only textual and bodily representations, but strategic media techniques were also heavily exploited, confirming layered collusive effects that appealed to the audience on the spot as well as through the TV screen. To achieve this, I postulate three layers of performance, each tactfully geared so that (1) the speech text was poetically formulated in terms of “fractal” tripartite units on different levels, (2) Senator Obama's verbal and nonverbal performances were accurately coordinated to project utterance boundaries to, and interact with, the audience, and (3) the TV broadcast also cultivated and expanded these tacit skills to effectively televise the historical victory in the presidential race.
