Rhetorical Landscapes in America

Gregory Clark

Description

A panoramic explanation of "civic tourism" and the shaping of a national identity

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.

Clark examines places in the American landscape that have facilitated such experiences, including New York City, Shaker villages, Yellowstone National Park, the Lincoln Highway, San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and the Grand Canyon. He examines the rhetorical power of these sites to transform private individuals into public citizens, and he evaluates a national culture that teaches Americans to experience certain places as potent symbols of national community.

Invoking Burke's concept of "identification" to explain such rhetorical encounters, Clark considers Burke's lifelong study of symbols—linguistic and otherwise—and their place in the construction and transformation of individual identity. Clark turns to Burke's work to expand our awareness of the rhetorical resources that lead individuals within a community to adopt a collective identity, and he considers the implications of nineteenth- and twentieth-century tourism for both visual rhetoric and the rhetoric of display.

Sujets

• Social
• Anthropology
• Psychology
• Rhetoric
• Social sciences
• Semantics
• Stylistics
• Discourse analysis
• National identity
• Social Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 24 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781643363240
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

R HETORICAL L ANDSCAPES IN A MERICA
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication
Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
R HETORICAL L ANDSCAPES IN A MERICA
Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke
G REGORY C LARK
University of South Carolina Press
2004 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2004
Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2022
www.uscpress.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Clark, Gregory, 1950-
Rhetorical landscapes in America : variations on a theme from Kenneth Burke / Gregory Clark.
p. cm. - (Studies in rhetoric/communication)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57003-539-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. National characteristics, American. 2. Group identity-United States-History. 3. Landscape-Social aspects-United States-History. 4. Tourism-Social aspects-United States-History. 5. Burke, Kenneth, 1897- 6. Rhetoric-Philosophy. 7. United States-Civilization-Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series.
E169.1.C525 2004
306.4 819 0973-dc22
2003027552
ISBN 978-1-64336-324-0 (ebook)
The poem Tossing on Floodtides of Sinkership by Kenneth Burke is quoted by kind permission of the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust.
Front cover illustration: C. Crane, The Valley of the Yosemite , published in America Illustrated (1883) by David J. Williams. Courtesy of the author.
To S. Michael Halloran mentor and friend
C ONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction The Rhetorical Experience of Landscape
Chapter 1 Landscape, National Identity, and Civic Tourism
Chapter 2 New York City and the Public Experience of an American Scene
Chapter 3 Shaker Tourism and the Rhetorical Experience of the Aesthetic
Chapter 4 Transcendence at Yellowstone
Chapter 5 Public Experience along the Lincoln Highway
Chapter 6 Constituting Citizens at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition
Conclusion Rhetorical Landscapes and the Ambiguities of Identification
Bibliography
Index
I LLUSTRATIONS 1 View of Lower Manhattan from New Jersey 2 Mahlon Day s New-York Guide 3 Mahlon Day s New-York Scenes 4 Bert Phillips s Sister Charlotte 5 A Wonderful Little World of People 6 Langford s Scribner s article on Yellowstone 7 Alice s Adventures in the New Wonderland 8 Yellowstone National Park: The Land of Geysers 9 The route of the Lincoln Highway 10 Emily Post s By Motor to the Golden Gate 11 Views of the Lincoln Highway 12 Seeing America 13 Views of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition 14 Cover of the December 1910 issue of Sunset magazine 15 Viewing the exposition from the sea 16 The Indian Watchtower at Desert View 17 Interior and exterior detail of the Indian Watchtower 18 View through a reflectoscope at the Indian Watchtower
S ERIES E DITOR S P REFACE
In Rhetorical Landscapes in America , Gregory Clark explores how tourism has constituted a sense of collective national identity. Clark describes tourism as significantly a rhetorical experience, supplementing the appeals of public discourse with the non-discursive experience of visiting tourist sites across the American landscape in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Land , writes Clark, becomes landscape when it is assigned the role of symbol, and as symbol it functions rhetorically. When landscapes are publicized-when they are shared in public discourse or in the nondiscursive form of what I am calling a public experience-they do the rhetorical work of symbolizing a common home and, thus, a common identity.
Clark argues that American identity is shaped in part by domestic travel and by reading about such travel as an exercise in civic tourism, in which Americans feel themselves to be enacting shared public experiences.
Clark s tour of the American landscape takes in early guides to New York City; the aesthetics of Shaker villages; the transcendent romance of Yellowstone; and a transcontinental journey along the Lincoln Highway where Clark introduces readers to the rhetoric of the American road. Clark s constant companion is Kenneth Burke, whose theoretical perspectives frame the work and whose zest for the American landscape provides a provocative refrain.
T HOMAS W. B ENSON
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been slow going, and that has been enjoyable because of the opportunity it gave me to meet the many good people who have assisted me along the way.
A number of archivists have been very helpful: Lee H. Whittlesey, at the Yellowstone Research Library; Laura Wasowicz at the American Antiquarian Society; Magda Gabor-Hotchkiss and Christian Goodwillie at the Amy Bess and Lawrence K. Miller Library of Hancock Shaker Village; Jerry Grant at the Shaker Museum and Library; Gay Marks at the Shaker Library at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village; Lorraine Reno at Sunset magazine; Eileen Kennedy Morales at the Museum of the City of New York, as well as archivists at the Heard Museum, University of Wyoming, the Pattee Library at Pennsylvania State University, and the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.
Many scholarly friends have responded to parts of this project over the years. I am grateful to Michael Halloran for helping me learn about rhetorical landscapes and Jack Selzer for helping me learn about Kenneth Burke. I am particularly grateful to Jerry Hauser and Rosa Eberly for their careful and caring reading of the final manuscript.
I appreciate the advice and encouragement of the Studies in Rhetoric/Communication series editor, Thomas Benson, and of Barry Blose at the University of South Carolina Press as the manuscript was proposed, developed, and revised. I am also grateful for the editing work of Karen Beidel and the index provided by Linda Webster.
I appreciate the patient support of the English Department and the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University-support that took the forms of both time and money-that enabled me to research and write this book.
I thank Kenneth Burke for his life and work.
And I thank Linda and my daughters, fellow travelers who, one way or another, keep me moving along a good road.
R HETORICAL L ANDSCAPES IN A MERICA
Introduction
T HE R HETORICAL E XPERIENCE OF L ANDSCAPE
It is late March 1967. Recent issues of Life -perhaps the most widely read national magazine-lie on side tables and coffee tables in homes and offices throughout America. The February 24 issue has a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor on the cover above the title of its feature article, Burton Analyzes Liz. The cover of the next issue, March 3, announces the photographic essay Lost Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The cover photo for the March 10 issue, taken from inside a cargo plane of paratroopers jumping into Vietnam, introduces a feature titled New Tactics Step Up the War. For the March 17 issue, it is a photo of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa smiling over the caption Hoffa Goes to Jail. Immediately inside those covers are Life s short editorials-on rising crime in America, a CIA scandal, abortion conflicts, the need for a more equitable draft, Robert Kennedy s challenges to LBJ s Vietnam policy. It is springtime in the United States, just beginning to warm toward a long summer during which the streets of the nation s cities will fill with people protesting the war and rioting in rejection of the racism that still characterizes the national culture.
This is the context in which Life inaugurated a new project: a series of spectacular photographic essays to be published under the general celebratory title To See This Land, To See America. The first one appeared in the March 3 issue, with this introduction:
The sun burns off the morning mist, the wind rises and the air swells with freshness renewed, and the varied and ample land, as Walt Whitman called America, stands forth. Whitman was awed by his subject into uncharacteristic understatement. For America was created on the heroic scale. The mountains are flung up, at once so massive and yet so delicately sculpted that one aches with wonder to behold them. The rivers trace a filigree intricate as the veining of a maple leaf, and hills sprawl flat to make a desert rivaling in unchanging vastness the skies themselves. The beauty of this land is revealed in an infinity of images. To see this land, to see America, Life here begins an exploration that will enlist many photographers, whose discoveries will appear at intervals over the next several years. (50)
Fifteen pages of fine aerial photography follow: carefully composed color images of orderly New England villages, peaceful farms, pristine forests, and sublime seascapes. The next issue, March 10, published the second installment of the series, this one presenting pleasant photographs of American cities, each composed from the closer view afforded by the windows of high-rise buildings. But no further installments of the series appeared in Life that spring. Indeed, the first issue in April featured a more urgent photographic essay: a set of exclusive photographs of the streets of Hanoi during American air raids titled North Vietnam under Siege.
In July of that difficult year, during some of the most intense civil conflict that living Americans had experienced, Kenneth Burke published an essay in the Nation with a title that also seems celebratory, Responsibilities of National Greatness. But his purpose was admonitory. This was yet another statement of the primary lesson of citizenship he had been trying to teach Americans for a half century: