Rhetorics of Display (review)

Rhetorics of display involve questions of political and expressive agency that carry weighty consequences: how and who we publicly remember, who is able to express identity or affiliation without worrying about physical safety, what we see when walking to work and what that tells us about who we are summoned to be. As the bitter public controversies over the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York and Olivier Toscani's advertising campaign for Benetton suggest, the extensive integration of visual communication into both public and private life has significant implications for how we understand rhetorical communication as well as for the selves and communities served and established through it. Such questions are insightfully explored in Lawrence J. Prelli's Rhetorics of Display.

In Prelli's words, Rhetorics of Display presents "a conceptually focused perspective on rhetorical studies of display" with a plurality of methodologies and theoretical approaches (1). The book is an edited collection of 17 essays divided into sections that cohere around four topoi: interconnections between the visual and verbal, material rhetorics of display, demonstration and display, and epideictic discourse. Prelli's introduction is followed by essays by Mari Boor Tonn, James Michael Farrell, S. Michael Halloran and Gregory Clark, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, Gerard A. Hauser, Lawrence W. Rosenfield, and a second essay by Prelli. The theme that pulls the collection together is the nature of "situated rhetorics" (16).

Arguing that "rhetorics of display are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture and, thus, have become the dominant rhetoric of our time"—a claim W. J. T. Mitchell may want to argue with—in the introduction Prelli offers several "historical vignettes," such as the Greco-Roman origins of rhetoric, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, before turning to theory on display from more current scholars such as Kenneth Burke, Richard McKeon, and Chaim Perelman. Prelli's introduction offers a strong contextual and historical starting point for the rest of the volume.

Moving into the chapters, the first section takes up the interconnectivity between visual and verbal rhetorics. Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp and Prelli lead the charge in their "mirror" studies. Jorgensen-Earp uses the Titanic exhibition to explore metaphor's power to direct interpretations of visual rhetoric; Prelli uses the international court battle over oceanic boundaries between the United States and Canada to explore imagery's power to direct interpretations of language-based argument. The remaining two essays in this section offer investigations that highlight the cross-fertilization of verbal and visual culture. James Michael Farrell frames nineteenth-century illustrations of the Irish Famine as synecdoche that "required verbal interpretation [found] in the descriptive notes that accompanied them" (85). Analyzing the famous Tiananmen Square photograph, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites contend that photographic illustrations buttress "modernist norms of print culture, including an emphasis on universal legibility and rationality" (133).

The second section presents five essays that consider the rhetorical roles of material culture in influencing public identities and political perspectives, beginning with three essays that consider public artifacts. S. Michael Halloran and Gregory Clark assay that the "public landscapes constituted by the U.S. national park movement display symbols that enable citizens to participate in a civic religion" (141). Beverly James's analysis of the construction and destruction of Hungary's Stalin monument makes clear the importance of material memory sites as spaces for political engagement and contestation, a project that Victoria J. Gallagher also takes up, using theory on genre and public memory to address the display of race at Stone Mountain (the "Mount Rushmore of the South"). The last two essays in this section investigate more private (and privatized) instantiations of display. Richard Morris evaluates the rhetoric of gravescapes, arguing that they function as material manifestations of traditions of interpretation and response. Appraising the "aestheticization of the public realm," Lawrence W. Rosenfield pithily contemplates Las Vegas casinos, closing with the provocative observation that the "casino's rhetoric presents the inn at the end of the rainbow, hell-on-earth devoid of unsettling...