Book Review: Rhetorical Landscapes in America

Rhetorical Landscapes in America Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke

Gregory Clark. Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke. Publications: Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004, (cloth) 181 pages. ISBN: 1570035393. $38.00.

Summary

The American public landscape constitutes components of our shared sense of common identity (148).

American tourism has contributed to developing the United States as a national community, and thus, inherently has rhetorical agency.

It is possible to analyze Burke’s work by discussing historical accounts of American Tourism. The following situations, for example, have played a part in the development of Amerian’s shared national identity and practices of tourism and travel.

Successive encounters, such as a scripted path along the Lincoln Highway or some other shared public space can build communal identity. This form of rhetoric involves much more than just prose narrative or the rhetorical analysis of history.

Five Illustrative Analytical Accounts:

New York City and the Public Experience of an American “Scene”

Shaker Tourism and the Rhetorical Experience of the Aesthetic

Transcendence at Yellowstone (Wait, is this a MYstory?)

Public Experience along the Lincoln Highway

Constituting Citizens at the Panama-Pacific International Expposition

Key Terms

American Scene, Representative Anecdote, Identification, American Tourism, Lincoln Highway, Ambiguities of Identification, Constitutive, Attitude

Significance

Clark maps out Burke within a particular context of spatial, cultural, and physical practices. Clark uses the institution of American tourism to track and unpack Burke’s vocabulary and ideas. I feel that this enriches Burkean rhetorical scholarship, by opening his work up to many other applicable fields, such as American Studies and History, obviously, but also discussions about city planning, graphic design, marketing, and economics. The work is helpful in working toward an understanding of Burke, by providing an example of reading Burkean rhetorical theory in action, however one should remember that it is only one example, of many such possibilities.

Secondary Sources

- Garrett, Mark Longaker, "Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke (review)." KB Journal 1.2 (Spring 2005) http://www.kbjournal.org/node/51

- Rosenfield, Lawrence William. "Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke (review)." Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.2 (2006): 172-73. Print

- Images selected from: http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/national-parks/vintage-posters/

Notable Quotes

“For him, [Burke] it is our encounters with each other’s symbols that enable us to make and to change the identities that act and interact with common purpose. That common purpose is constructed more or less collaboratively from the resources of common rhetorical situations…” (3).

"For Americans, their nation has always been a ‘scene’ in this dramatistic sense of that term as a symbolic setting where they can enact both individual and collective identity" (3).

“This chapter continues to develop my general point that Burke’s work expands our understanding of ways the rhetorical work of constituting a public identity is done through exchanges of symbols, a point illustrated by encounters with shared landscapes that have the capacity to prompt individuals to make themselves over in a common image” (96).