L'America nella retorica presidenziale:identità (con)divise, perdute, ritrovate

This study aims to analyze the narratives of nation-building identities developed by the US
presidential rhetoric, highlighting the unifying function, carried out in the past and even more so in
the present, for an extraordinarily complex, fragmented and diverse society. The analysis examines
a corpus of presidential speeches, selected for the importance of the institutional place and the
communicative circumstance of their delivery. By employing Critical Discourse Analysis,
complemented occasionally by the methods of Corpus Linguistics, (inclusive and exclusive)
presidential rhetorical strategies are investigated and showed to be sometimes contradictory and
oftentimes heedless of the historical memory. Used to forge, promote and renew the image of a
unified national identity, this nevertheless betrays the unchanged centrality of work ethic based on
productivity and industriousness, necessary for the realization of the American dream.