Visualizing Public Address

In the late 1980s, Stephen E. Lucas and David Zarefsky argued that rhetorical scholars should embrace more pluralistic approaches to the study of public address. In narrating a history of a field he declared to be in "renaissance," Lucas advanced a broad definition of public address as the "study of the full range of public discursive rhetorical acts—historical and contemporary, oral and written, considered individually or as part of a broader campaign or movement."¹ Similarly, David Zarefsky observed that recent scholarship already had illustrated a change in scholars' working assumptions: "We have enlarged the meaning of 'public address' from a mode to a function of discourse."² Implicit in both scholars' definitions is the possibility that attention to "the full range of public discursive rhetorical acts" might entail the study of artifacts of visual culture as well. Our goal in this essay is to explore more explicitly what it might mean to "visualize" public address.³

The visual is by no means absent from public address scholarship; indeed, in recent years rhetoric and public address scholars have paid increasing attention to the visual aspects of public address.⁴ For precisely this reason, it may be time to reflect more deeply about how we research and write about visual politics. A visual turn need not displace the study of public address as talk and text, but it might open up space for richer consideration of the ways that citizenship, democracy, and deliberation are constructed in visual culture.

In his keynote address at the Seventh Biennial Public Address Conference, Martin J. Medhurst argued for the need to reconfigure public address studies, particularly with regard to doctoral training. Medhurst outlined seven types of expertise that we might cultivate in graduate students, including period expertise (training in a specific era, such as the American Revolution), textual expertise (devotion to one rich text or set of texts that warrant extended study, such as the Declaration of Independence), and genre expertise (attention to specific types of public address, such as presidential rhetoric or the rhetoric of war).⁵ None of Medhurst's seven categories directly engaged the question of expertise in terms of visuality, though they certainly might have. If, as Medhurst observed, Stephen E. Lucas possesses expertise in the American Revolution, then so too does Lester Olson, whose studies of "rhetorical iconography" (one of which we review here) explore the complex visual politics of the early American republic.⁶ In a similar vein, Medhurst's notions of "textual" and "genre" expertise might be reframed to allow for the recognition of rich visual discourses as well. Thus we might speak of graduate students' cultivation of expertise in a specific visual archive, such as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography project, or in mediated genres such as documentary or television.⁷

Yet attention to visuality involves more than simply the addition of the artifacts of visual culture to our critical repertoires, as the scholarship we review in this essay illustrates. The books we take up here represent a range of fields in which one might locate scholarship on the visual aspects of public address, including art history, history, literary and cultural studies, and rhetorical studies. The authors engage a variety...