Environmental melodrama

Rhetorical scholarship criticizes melodrama for its tendency to simplify and reify public controversies and valorizes the comic frame as an ethically superior mode of rhetoric. These judgments are rooted in the discipline's reliance on Burkean categories, a reductionist conception of melodrama, and an implicit assumption that social unification should be the telos of rhetoric. In response, this essay advances a concept of melodrama as an integrated set of rhetorical appeals. It uses examples of environmental rhetoric to illustrate how the inventional resources of melodrama can transform public controversies and oppose dominant discourses that rationalize or obscure threats to the quality and existence of life on Earth. Based on these arguments, the essay endorses a sophistic critical perspective that foregrounds timeliness as the primary ground for rhetorical judgment and refuses to treat any rhetorical frame as inherently superior to another.