THE ENIGMATIC ENDS OF RHETORIC - CHURCHILL FULTON ADDRESS AS GREAT ART AND FAILED PERSUASION

Winston Churchill's Westminster College, or ''Iron Curtain,'' speech i s usually considered to have been an artistic success and persuasive f ailure. This paper examines the meaning and validity of this judgment through a close reading of the text that seeks to account for the rela tionship of all three of the speech's primary metaphors and its antral argument in terms of both ''illocutionary act'' and ''perlocutionay e ffect.''