Sharing values to safeguard the future: British Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration as epideictic rhetoric

This article explores the rhetoric, and mass-mediation, of the national Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) commemoration ceremony, as broadcast on British television. I argue that the televised national ceremonies should be approached as an example of multi-genre epideictic rhetoric, working up meanings through a hybrid combination of genres (speeches, poems, readings), author/animators and modes (speech, music, light, movement and silence). Epideictic rhetoric has often been depreciated as simply ceremonial “praise or blame” speeches. However, given that the topics of praise/blame assume the existence of social norms, epideictic also acts to presuppose and evoke common values in general, and a collective recognition of shared social responsibilities in particular. My methodology draws on the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, given, first, its central prominence on analysing argumentative strategies in discourse and, second, the ways it facilitates a reflexive ‘shuttling’ between text-discursive features, intertextual relations, and wider contexts of society and history. Here, I examine how a catastrophic past is invoked in speech and evoked through image and music, in response to the demands that uncertainty of the future “places upon one’s conscience” (Lauer 2015:12).