Brian L. Ott

Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum

Few places tell the myth of the American frontier more vigorously than the Buffalo Bill Museum does in Cody, Wyoming. Traveling to the museum through the ‘Western’ landscape of Wyoming into the foothills of the Rockies prepares visitors for the tale of Western settlement. This narrative, which works to secure a particular vision of the West, draws upon the material artifacts of Cody’s childhood and his exploits as scout, Pony Express rider and showman. The museum retells the story that Cody first told to millions at the turn of the twentieth century in his Wild West arena show. In this paper, we argue that the museum privileges images of masculinity and Whiteness, while using the props, films, and posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to carnivalize the violent conflicts between Anglo Americans and Native Americans.

Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2002 convention of the Western States Communication Association.

Museums, memorials, and other historic places are key sites in the construction of collective memory and national identity. The Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming is one such space of memory where the (pre)history of “America” and its native peoples is told. Based on the view of texts as experiential landscapes, it is argued that this museum works to absolve Anglo-visitors of the social guilt regarding Western conquest through a rhetoric of reverence. This rhetorical mode invites visitors to adopt a respectful, but distanced observational gaze. A concluding section assesses the social and political consequences of memorializing in this mode.

(Re)locating pleasure in media studies: toward an erotics of reading

ab-stract, (n.) 1. a summary of points (as of a writing) usu. presented in skeletal form. (adj.) 1. difficult to understand: abstruse. (vt.) 1. dissociate, remove, separate. This essay concerns how language is, at once, structured (producing meaning) and infinite (destabilizing meaning). Both functions of language are tied to pleasure. Contemporary critical media studies, it is argued, has attacked the pleasure (plaisir) of languages structuring function while simultaneously repressing the pleasure (jouissance) of languages dismantling function. Is this to(o) abstract?

Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum

Boasting over 6000 objects, including replicas of a western hardware store, a frontier stage stop, and a late nineteenth-century industrial factory, the Cody Firearms Museum, located at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, is “the largest and most important collection of American firearms in the world.” 1 The museum, which creates a decidedly visual space through its near-exclusive engagement with looking, employs an aesthetic of domestication and sterility to frame firearms for museumgoers. Even as it transforms guns into inert objects of visual pleasure, the museum cannot fully erase the history of violence and colonial conquering in which guns played a starring role. The museums rhetorical effectivity/affectivity, then, turns upon the unique play of presence and absence.

Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in Translation as Sensual Experience

The rise of the new information technologies, and corresponding proliferation of signs, images, and information, has contributed to a growing sense of alienation and dislocation. For many, the contemporary moment is an unending and disorienting sea of sensory-symbolic excesses. Lost in Translation is a film addressed to these anxieties. Engaging the film as a sensual experience, we argue that Lost in Translation equips viewers to confront the feelings of alienation and dislocation brought on by the sensory-symbolic excesses of (post)modernity by fostering a sense of choric connection. This sense, we demonstrate, is elicited primarily by the films material (nonsymbolic, aesthetic) dimensions. Drawing on an analysis of the films aesthetic elements, we conclude by reflecting on the implications for film studies, rhetorical studies, and everyday life.

On Critical-Rhetorical Pedagogy: Dialoging with Schindler's List

The two prevailing critical paradigms in rhetorical and media studies can be characterized as artistic and ideological. Despite their evident differences, both of these analytical modes impose a final signified on the text. That is to say, each approach insists its critical interpretation is authoritative. Consequently, neither mode is particularly well suited to the broad aims of critical pedagogy, which values the dynamic and always-unfinished interplay among text, citizen-student, and other. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtins notion of dialogism, this essay offers an alternative critical paradigm that values the lived experiences of students and promotes agentive citizenship. This paradigm, which we have dubbed critical-rhetorical pedagogy (CRP), conceptualizes criticism dialogically and situates it in a much larger network of pedagogical and political discourses. To illustrate the utility of CRP, this essay provisionally sketches how it might be practiced to critically engage Stephen Spielbergs 1993 film Schindlers List.

The Pedagogy and Politics of Art in Postmodernity: Cognitive Mapping and The Bothersome Man

This essay inquires into the pedagogical and political dimensions of art in the contemporary moment. Specifically, it seeks to reanimate Fredric Jamesons notion of “cognitive mapping,” which he introduced as a response to the postmodern problem of representing the social totality. To that end, the essay begins by explicating the twin impulses of cognitive mapping. It, then, undertakes a sustained rhetorical analysis of Jens Liens award-winning 2006 Norwegian film, The Bothersome Man, demonstrating how the film employs entropic satire to, at once, map and critique the cultural logic of late capitalism. The essay concludes by reflecting on the important contributions rhetorical scholars can make to a renewed interest in cognitive mapping.

Neoliberal Capitalism, Globalization, and Lines of Flight Vectors and Velocities at the 16th Street Mall

In this essay we resist claims that neoliberal capitalism is all-encompassing and inescapably flat by attending the materiality of a specific site of globalization: Denver’s 16th Street Mall. Taking vector and velocity as critical terms that demand attention to materiality and temporality, we suggest that globalization is rough rather than flat. Using vector and velocity, our critical engagement with The Mall demonstrates complex interplays of global and local, systemic and transgressive, and highlights an intriguing range of tactical, embodied negotiations that suggest potential lines of flight. We argue that careful attention to spatial rhetorics provides intellectuals with powerful critical tools for interrupting and intervening in the spatial politics of the 21st century.

Memory and the West Reflections on Place, Practice, and Performance

The research collected in this special issue demonstrates that memory is mobilized symbolically and materially, spatially and temporally. It is fully embodied and often works affectively.

(Re)Imagining the West: The Whitney Gallery of Western Art’s Sacred Hymn

In 2009, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (WGWA), located within the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (BBHC) in Cody, Wyoming, was redesigned—its art rehung and its vision of the West reimagined. The newly designed gallery replaced the structuring principles of history, artist, and genre that had governed the previous layout and design of the gallery with a thematic structure that elicits a series of affective dissonances. In this essay, we argue that the redesigned Whitney Gallery of Western Art performs a sacred hymn that—in repositioning Buffalo Bill Cody as its orchestrating figure—resolves discordant images and narratives of the West, harmonizes diverse themes into a single vision, and reconstitutes national identity in terms of the Western sublime.