Rhetorics of Display / Edition 1

by Lawrence J. Prelli

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781570036194
Publisher:	University of South Carolina Press
Publication date:	06/15/2006
Series:	Studies in Rhetoric & Communication
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	472
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lawrence J. Prelli is an associate professor of communication, chairperson of the Department of Communication, and an affiliate associate professor in the Department of Natural Resources at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse, which received the 1990 Eastern Communication Association's Everett Lee Hunt Award.

Table of Contents

1. Rhetorics of Display: An Introduction, by Lawrence J. Prelli
2. Satisfaction of Metaphorical Expectations through Visual Display: The Titanic Exhibition, by Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp
3. "This Horrible Spectacle": Visual and Verbal Sketches of the Famine in Skibbereen, by James Michael Farrell
4. Visualizing a Bounded Sea: A Case Study in Rhetorical Taxis, by Lawrence J. Prelli
5. Liberal Representation and Global Order: The Iconic Photograph from Tiananmen Square, by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites
6. National Park Landscapes and the Rhetorical Display of Civic Religion, by S. Michael Halloran and Gregory Clark
7. Envisioning Postcommunism: Budapest's Stalin Monument, by Beverly James
8. Displaying Race: Cultural Projection and Commemoration, by Victoria J. Gallagher
9. After Walter Benjamin: The Paradise at the End of the Rainbow, by Lawrence W. Rosenfield
10. Death on Display, by Richard K. Morris
11. Demonstrative Displays of Dissident Rhetoric: The Case of Prisoner 885/63, by Gerard A. Hauser
12. It's Showtime! Staging Public Demonstrations, Alinsky-Style, by Jerry Blitefield
13. Creating Real Presences: Displays in Liminal Worlds, by John Shotter
14. Epideictic and Its Cultural Reception: In Memory of the Figherfighers, by John C. Adams
15. Flaunting Identity: Spatial Figurations and the Display of Sexuality, by John Nguyet Erni
16. Tattoo and Piercing: Reflections on Mortification, by Phebe Shih Chao
17. Colin Powell's Life Story and the Display of a "Good" Black Persona, by Mari Boor Tonn
18. Displaying the Body Politic: Televisual Exposures and Concealments, by Joshua Meyrowitz

What People are Saying About This

Lester C. Olson

"To develop a sustained argument that rhetorics of display have become the dominant communication practices of our time, Larry Prelli presents wide-ranging case studies concerning symbolic actions from around the globe. Well grounded in the history of rhetoric and visual communication, the introduction and the ensuing seventeen essays concentrate on concealment and appearances ranging from the bodily presentation of self and social identity to the material culture of landscapes, statuary, and gravestones. Rhetorics of Display is a valuable resource for communication scholars and an exceptional invitation for further study."
—University of Pittsburgh, and author of Benjamin Franklin’s Vision of American Community: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology