Saturday, June 16, 2007

Lecture: Policy Debate - Against Irony


This is a lecture I gave at the 2001 World Debate Institute. Various affirmative teams had used an “ironic” approach to the topic, going overboard by arguing that the answer to poverty in Africa was to expand McDonald’s restaurants, and Texas had used Swift’s ironic piece “A Modest Proposal” as well. I am always excited by and interested in new argumentative approaches, so I threw myself into doing some thinking and some research. This lecture is the result. I am not opposed to ironic approaches in debating, but I do want to have a debate about it instead of just hearing the other team say “You can’t do that!”

Click to view or right click to save to your hard drive:
http://www.uvm.edu/~debate/watch/wdi01irony.m4v

Best watched with iTunes, just drag it in.

To see everything in the new videos file, go to
http://www.uvm.edu/~debate/watch/

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