Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action

Benson, Thomas W.

ISBN 10: 0271065877 / ISBN 13: 9780271065878

Published by Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016

About this Item

University Park. 2016. January 2016. Pennsylvania State University Press. 1st American Paperback Edition. Very Good in Wrappers. 9780271065878. 66 color/54 b&w illustrations. 7 × 10. 224 pages. paperback. keywords: Communication Studies/History/Political Science. DESCRIPTION - Thomas Benson has rediscovered and shared a treasure of poster art, along with some history, brilliantly told.' - Tom Hayden. With Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action, Thomas Benson generously shares an archival treasure trove with readers. By itself that might be enough, but Benson doesn't stop there. He offers a thoughtful and sophisticated rhetorical analysis of the posters that reads them in historical context, elaborates the visual traditions from which they drew their representations, and considers how viewers of the era might have responded to them. In doing so, he makes a compelling case for the posters' rhetorical importance, both then and now. The book skillfully models the practice of visual rhetorical history for students and scholars alike.' - Cara Finnegan, University of Illinois. Long before there was a sub-discipline called visual rhetoric,' Thomas Benson was probing the rhetorical dimensions of visual images. His books on the films of Frederick Wiseman and on political documentaries set the standard for rhetorically informed criticism of documentary film. Now Benson has turned his attention to the political protest posters that appeared in Berkeley, California, throughout the tumultuous year of 1970. Benson was a visiting assistant professor at UC Berkeley during the 1969 70 academic year, where he witnessed firsthand the distribution and placement of many of the posters he examines in this book. He places the posters in their political, cultural, social, and rhetorical contexts, and he engages in a close reading that uncovers the layers of meaning and significance that were clear to the creators at the time of production but that now, almost forty-five years later, are often lost in the mists of time. This is a masterful work of recovery that reminds us anew of that time when the whole world was watching.' - Martin J. Medhurst, Baylor University. inventory #42730.

Seller Inventory # z42730

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0271065877
• ISBN 13: 9780271065878
• Binding: paperback
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good in Wrappers
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

About this title

Synopsis

By the spring of 1970, Americans were frustrated by continuing war in Vietnam and turmoil in the inner cities. Students on American college campuses opposed the war in growing numbers and joined with other citizens in ever-larger public demonstrations against the war. Some politicians―including Ronald Reagan, Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon―exploited the situation to cultivate anger against students. At the University of California at Berkeley, student leaders devoted themselves, along with many sympathetic faculty, to studying the war and working for peace. A group of art students designed, produced, and freely distributed thousands of antiwar posters. Posters for Peace tells the story of those posters, bringing to life their rhetorical iconography and restoring them to their place in the history of poster art and political street art. The posters are vivid, simple, direct, ironic, and often graphically beautiful. Thomas Benson shows that the student posters from Berkeley appealed to core patriotic values and to the legitimacy of democratic deliberation in a democracy―even in a time of war.

About the Author

Thomas W. Benson is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric at The Pennsylvania State University.