Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke

Studies in Rhetoric & Communication

by Gregory Clark

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.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2004

About the author

I am a professor of English whose interests are in rhetoric -- with "rhetoric" understood as the ways and means of influence.

Much of my work explores the ways that aesthetic experiences (travel and landscapes, music) influence our feelings, attitudes, and perspectives.

My books are primarily academic works, but I do try to make them interesting and accessible to nonacademic readers with good stories and elements of memoir to go along with the theory.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I genuinely enjoyed reading this book, which is definitely something of a ramble through historical American tourism, through which Kenneth Burke sometimes pokes his hoary-haired head. I didn’t ever feel like there was much a unified thrust—just that we were exploring how areas as disparate as Shaker country, Yellowstone and the Lincoln Highway are all related to the vague idea that rhetoric can occur through the presentation of place. Still, interesting rhetorical analysis.