Between entertainment and politics. The case of commencement addresses as forms of presidential discourse.

As part of a larger corpus-based research project into Commencement Addresses (hereafter CAs) and their role in American Presidential discourse (Arizzi 2017), this paper focuses on a critical exploration of a selection of the CAs delivered by sitting US presidents between 1992 and 2021. Graduation ceremonies in the US typically include inspirational CAs delivered by notable figures, that have been studied from several perspectives (Solly 2012, 2014; Martin 1985; Mubarak/Rhaif 2021). The research corpus created using transcriptions from the American Presidency Projects website and corresponding YouTube videos, is quantitatively and qualitatively analysed in terms of genre and performance, to see what correlations exists with the two main categories of graduates involved: those from US Universities and those from military academies. Following Gofman’s view of social interactions in everyday life as performances in which people act as actors on a stage (Gofman 1959), the research more specifically reflects on the contexts and circumstances that the corpus reveals, focusing, in particular, on the analysis of the performances of US presidents-as-commencement-speakers analysed using multimodal methods (Baldry/Thibault 2006). The paper concludes with some reflections on how political and non-political genres tend to combine, requiring politicians to balance institutional roles with a more entertaining performance, a trend that seems to confirm what has been called the fictionalisation of politics or politicisation of fiction (Wodak 2009; Wodak/Forchtner 2018).