Questions:

1) How does Obama organize his speech?

He divides his speech into sections and treat each section in a different way. Each section is very different in content, and it is the switch of content which motivates a switch of style and renews the audience's motivation to listen.

2) How does Obama begin his speech stylistically?

He opens his speech with a if-clause with three who-clause embeddings.

3) How does the speech develop in paragraphs 2-4 ?

Each of the paragraphs after the first begins in the same parallel way.

4) How does the speech develop in paragraphs 5-28?

5) How does Obama end his speech?

6) How does Obama elaborate on his cherished theme --- the perfection of the Union ?

He expands epically through American space and time. Behind his speech were Lincoln’s First Inaugural, which moved anxiously over “every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land,” and his Second, which promised to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Obama quoted from the end of the First Inaugural—“We are not enemies, but friends”—and the implication was clear: that the past eight years have been a kind of civil war.

7) How does Obama elaborate on his cherished theme---the perfection of the Union ?

He sought to bind those wounds by binding people together. First, he moved through the people—young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight.

Then he moved through the country—the back yards of Des Moines, the living rooms of Concord—ending, by way of the Gettysburg Address, with the earth: “from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that, more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth.”

And then he moved through time, using the epic novelist’s trick of a heroine as old as the century.

8) What dos Obama intend to illustrate by referring to Ann Nixon Cooper?

He intends to highlight the century change.

Ann Nixon Cooper, at the age of a hundred and six, had voted in Atlanta. Obama imagines all that she had seen: woman suffrage, the “despair in the dust bowl, and Depression across the land”; the start of the Second World War, when “bombs fell on our harbor” ; and “the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma.”

1. Further Discussion

1) What are Obama's rhetoric in delivering the victory speech?

2) Why does Obama refer to his own personal story in the speech?

3) How do you understand Obama’s perfection of the union?