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A gaunt woman stares into the bleakness of the Great Depression. An exuberant sailor plants a kiss on a nurse in the heart of Times Square. A naked Vietnamese girl runs in terror from a napalm attack. An unarmed man stops a tank in Tiananmen Square. These and a handful of other photographs have become icons of public culture: widely recognized, historically significant, emotionally resonant images that are used repeatedly to negotiate civic identity. But why are these images so powerful? How do they remain meaningful across generations? What do they expose--and what goes unsaid? InNo Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites provide the definitive study of the iconic photograph ...
In this book, Hariman and Lucaites provide an account of how photojournalism creates a distinctive and valuable way of understanding the modern world, plus example of how the public spectator can think about and with photographs in order to develop that understanding. Coming off the banner success of their No Caption Needed (2007), The Public Image takes that book forward with the express purpose of promoting visual literacy as a civic skill. In the end they aim to enlarge the conceptual scope of photography as a mode of experience, a medium for social thought, and a public art. Public thought needs both good writing and good photography, and this indicates the contemporary shift in talk abo...
Drawing on speeches, newspapers, magazines, and other public discourse, Condit and Lucaites survey the shifting meaning of equality from 1760 to the present as a process of interaction and negotiation among different social groups in American politics and culture.
In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance. For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans. Yet, the normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.
"Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics explores the relationship between rhetoric's materiality and the social world in the late modern political context. Taking as their point of departure a reprint of Michael Calvin McGee's 1982 call to reconceptualize rhetoric as the palpable +experience; of sociality, the authors in this volume grapple anew with the role of communication practices in contemporary collective life. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, these twelve original essays supplement, extend, and challenge McGee's position, collectively advocating on behalf of a shift in theoretical and critical attention from rhetorical materialism to rhetoric's materiality." --Book Jacket.
This indispensable text brings together important essays on the themes, issues, and controversies that have shaped the development of rhetorical theory since the late 1960s. An extensive introduction and epilogue by the editors thoughtfully examine the current state of the field and its future directions, focusing in particular on how theorists are negotiating the tensions between modernist and postmodernist considerations. Each of the volume's eight main sections comprises a brief explanatory introduction, four to six essays selected for their enduring significance, and suggestions for further reading. Topics addressed include problems of defining rhetoric, the relationship between rhetoric and epistemology, the rhetorical situation, reason and public morality, the nature of the audience, the role of discourse in social change, rhetoric in the mass media, and challenges to rhetorical theory from the margins. An extensive subject index facilitates comparison of key concepts and principles across all of the essays featured.
Critical studies of the range of King’s public discourse as forms of sermonic rhetoric The nine essays in this volume offer critical studies of the range of King’s public discourse as forms of sermonic rhetoric. They focus on five diverse and relative short examples from King’s body of work: “Death of Evil on the Seashore,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “I Have a Dream,” “A Time to Break Silence,” and “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” Taken collectively, these five works span both the duration of King’s career as a public advocate but also represent the broad scope of his efforts to craft and project a persuasive vision a beloved community that persists through time.
Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains central to personal, communal, and national identities. And although popular and public discourses from speeches to films invite a shared sense of the past, official sites of memory such as memorials, museums, and battlefields embody unique rhetorical principles. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside acci
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 wh...
Regarding the Pain of Others is Susan Sontag's searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewer. Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience. 'Powerful, fascinating. Sontag is our outstanding contemporary writer in the moralist tradition'Sunday Times 'A coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering'The New York Times 'A far...