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Beyond “Rhetorical Agency”: Skutnik’s Story in the 1982 State of the Union Address

This essay theorizes agency’s relationship to rhetoric around five different kinds of agency: material, discursive, inventional, audience, and textual. I apply this theory to Lenny Skutnik’s rescue of Priscilla Tirado from a plane crash in 1982, primarily as told in President Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union address. More than a simple gimmick, archival records and public documents reveal how this landmark moment in presidential rhetoric was a complex rhetorical episode entangling politics, power, and agency. Ultimately, I offer new insight into the operations of agency and explore how the rhetorical study of agency might foster it.