“Outstanding”: early Schwarze and the seeds of melodrama

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, I reflect on how ideas and commitments that defined Steve Schwarze’s early engagements with rhetorical studies shaped his later work on environmental melodrama. Steve and I met as teenagers when we were both undergraduates at Drake University, studying with Robert Hariman, who encouraged his students to publish our own journal, Diatribe. Steve’s writings in that journal are astonishingly prescient and presage the later emphasis in his work on kairos, moral framings, feelings as a legitimate part of public discourse, and the need for self-reflexivity about the scholarly enterprise. I consider the impact of Steve’s work on my own thinking with an exploration of how his insights about melodrama illuminate the rhetorical force of the youth climate movement.