Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication) - Hardcover

Clark, Gregory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1570035393 ISBN 13: 9781570035395

Publisher: University of South Carolina Press, 2004

Synopsis

At the same time a reading of Kenneth Burke and of tourist landscapes in America, Gregory Clark's new study explores the rhetorical power connected with American tourism. Looking specifically at a time when citizens of the United States first took to rail and then highway to become sightseers in their own country, Clark traces the rhetorical function of a wide-ranging set of tourist experiences. He explores how the symbolic experiences Americans share as tourists have helped residents of a vast and diverse nation adopt a national identity. In doing so he suggests that the rhetorical power of a national culture is wielded not only by public discourse but also by public experiences.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"This is a book that should be read by everyone who cares about how we obtain our ideas and how we are led to identify with this or that community. Following Kenneth Burke’s brilliantly expanded definition of rhetoric as including all forms of ‘identification,’ Gregory Clark now demonstrates the ways in which the minds of even the most ‘thoughtless’ tourists are reshaped by what they see. The rhetoric of landscapes has hardly ever been mentioned before, and Clark’s demonstration of how it works may well change all careful readers’ (and tourists’) notions of how their minds have been shaped."—Wayne Booth, author of The Rhetoric of Fiction and coauthor of The Craft of Research

"Rhetorical Landscapes in America is an extraordinary book. Imaginatively expanding on Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric of identification, Gregory Clark skillfully guides us through a rich exploration of the discursive and nondiscursive experiences of civic tourism. In so doing, he persuasively demonstrates how those experiences of symbolic landscape significantly shape our individual and collective identities as Americans. At this moment in our national history, this book is a tour not to be missed."—Steven Mailloux, University of California, Irvine, Chancellor's Professor of Rhetoric and author of Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics

About the Author:

Gregory Clark studies rhetoric and the variety of ways that it operates in American culture. He is the author of Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation: A Social Perspective on the Function of Writing and coeditor of Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric. Clark is a professor of English at Brigham Young University and is editor of Rhetoric Society Quarterly. He lives in Provo, Utah

About this edition

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1570035393
• ISBN 13: 9781570035395
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200