Abstract

This thesis offers an analysis of the rhetoric of television news reports on Canada's public network Société Radio-Canada/CBC) during the 1990 Oka Amerindian crisis. Television offers a rhetoric inflected by postmodernism, which is to say with unconventional features that depart from common sense. Television develops a rhetoric of disproportion where, through the inversion of represented roles, the audience comes to witness the triumph of barbarism over civilization. This role reversal negates the belief in a harmony or consensus that would have existed before the crisis. The power of this rhetoric of disproportion creates the illusion of the victory of marginality, poverty and underdevelopment over the forces that represent social and political order. Furthermore, television accounts of the Oka crisis are not instances of production and reproduction of a "dominant ideology". Postmodernism implies the renunciation of all claims to universality, for the televised discourse produces roles for the various agents in accordance with the news context. This implies that television produces a narrative knowledge that generates, through paradox, its own language games, rules of legitimacy, hierarchies of credibility, and hierarchies of values. As such, television constructs an implicit rationality, a local knowledge , that is incompatible with modern rationality. Finally, this narrative of disproportion constructs the political community through an ambiguity that suggests the "downfall of civilization" and is expressed in and through a strange fascination with an aesthetic of primitivism.