Groundbreaking case studies mapping the rhetoric inherent in acts of presentation and concealment
Rhetorics of Display is a pathbreaking volume that brings together a distinguished group of scholars to assess an increasingly pervasive form of rhetorical activity. Editor Lawrence J. Prelli notes in his introduction that twenty-first century citizens continually confront displays of information and images, from the verbal images of speeches and literature to visual images of film and photography to exhibits in museums to the arrangement of our homes to the merchandising of consumer goods. The volume provides an integrated, comprehensive study of the processes of selecting what to reveal and what to conceal that together constitute the rhetorics of display. Surveying major historical transformations in the relationship between rhetoric and display, this book also identifies the leading themes in relevant scholarship of the past three decades.
Seventeen case studies canvass a representative and diverse range of displays—from body piercing to a civil rights memorial to a Titanic exhibition to imagery found in gambling casinos—and examine the ways that phenomena, persons, places, events, identities, communities, and cultures are exhibited before audiences. Collectively the contributors shed light on rhetorics that are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture.
- Cover
- Rhetorics of Display
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Editor’s Preface to the Ebook Edition
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Rhetorics of Display: An Introduction
- Part 1 The Verbal Depiction of the Visual and the Visual Depiction of the Verbal
- 2 Satisfaction of Metaphorical Expectations through Visual Display: The Titanic Exhibition
- 3 “This Horrible Spectacle”: Visual and Verbal Sketches of the Famine in Skibbereen
- 4 Visualizing a Bounded Sea: A Case Study in Rhetorical Taxis
- 5 Liberal Representation and Global Order: The Iconic Photograph from Tiananmen Square
- Part 2 The Disposition of Place and the Placing of Disposition
- 6 National Park Landscapes and the Rhetorical Display of Civic Religion
- 7 Envisioning Postcommunism: Budapest’s Stalin Monument
- 8 Displaying Race: Cultural Projection and Commemoration
- 9 After Walter Benjamin: The Paradise at the End of the Rainbow
- 10 Death on Display
- Part 3 Demonstrations as Rhetorical Display and Rhetorical Displays as Demonstrative
- 11 Demonstrative Displays of Dissident Rhetoric: The Case of Prisoner 885/63
- 12 It’s Showtime! Staging Public Demonstrations, Alinsky-Style
- 13 Creating Real Presences: Displays in Liminal Worlds
- Part 4 Epideictic Identifications and Divisions
- 14 Epideictic and Its Cultured Reception: In Memory of the Firefighters
- 15 Flaunting Identity: Spatial Figurations and the Display of Sexuality
- 16 Tattoo and Piercing: Reflections on Mortification
- 17 Colin Powell’s Life Story and the Display of a “Good” Black Persona
- 18 Displaying the Body Politic: Televisual Exposures and Concealments
- Selected Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
- About the Editor
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