Carole Blair

Public memorializing in postmodernity: The Vietnam veterans memorial as prototype

This essay argues for a reading of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a postmodern discourse. Beginning with a contrast of modernist and postmodern rhetorics of architecture, the authors suggest that the Memorial reflects the typical gestures of postmodern architecture. Moreover, they suggest that a consideration of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a postmodern discourse accounts for differences among other critical accounts, highlights the Memorials political stance, and bears implications for a postmodern monumentality. The essay concludes with a discussion of the critical assumptions that are placed at issue in a postmodern reading.

Disciplining the feminine

This essay, positioned at the nexus of several intellectual projects, including the rhetoric of inquiry, the ideological turn, critical rhetoric, and feminist theory, provides a case study of some of the practices in the communication discipline that support a masculinist ideology. The authors examine the ideological issues and practices implicated in a 1992 report on “Active Prolific Female Scholars in Communication” and in their effort to publish a critique of this report. The essay departs from normal conventions of academic writing, which privilege a unitary authorial voice, instead presenting the multivocality of several text fragments.

Reproducing civil rights tactics: The rhetorical performances of the civil rights memorial

Abstract The authors offer a reading of the Civil Rights Memorial (Maya Lin, Montgomery, Alabama, 1989) as a set of rhetorical performances that reproduce the tactical dimensions of Civil Rights Movement protests of the 1950s and 1960s. Their reading attempts to counter the reading ofAbramson who claims for the Memorial a conservative political stance. Specifically, they argue that, while the Memorial reproduces the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, it argues for a break with the past in its visual proffer of a politics of difference and a critique of whiteness.

The humanist turn in Foucault's rhetoric of inquiry

The authors discuss the relationship of Michel Foucaults work to the humanist perspective. They argue that Fisher is inaccurate in characterizing Foucault as an “anti‐humanist.” Instead, Foucault is properly read as sympathetic to the humanist perspective, and his concept of the “statement” and method of critique turn the humanist perspective away from an institutionalized, perhaps ideological, form that legitimizes the extant social order, and toward a liberating, activist form that allows for change within the status quo.

Contested Histories of Rhetoric: The Politics of Preservation, Progress, and Change.

This essay argues that the two principal modes of organizing rhetorical theories in histories of rhetoric, according to influence or systems, are problematic. Influence and systems histories frequently mask or distort the particularity of rhetorics history, and they implicitly disenfranchise future retheorizing of rhetoric. These problems result from the preservative and progressive politics that inhere in the ostensibly neutral organizational devices of influence and systems respectively. In conclusion, the essay forwards an alternative critical history that privileges the notions of text, particularity, change, and criticism.

The Statement: Foundation of Foucault's Historical Criticism.

Beginning with an overview of his approach to the study of historical systems of thought, this essay makes the claim that Michel Foucaults views of historical criticism and language‐in‐use have a great deal to offer rhetorical theory and criticism. More important, it argues that, if we are to assess Foucaults archaeological method in terms of its value for rhetorical criticism, an understanding of Foucaults notion of discourse is vital. Discussions of the three‐dimensional nature of discourse, together with an examination and illustration of the characteristics of the fundamental discursive datum, the statement, suggest a more extensive exploration of Foucaults corpus.

The Presence of the Present: Hijacking ‘The Good War’?

We forward a reading of the World War II Memorial, taking several peculiarities of its dedication ceremony as hermeneutic prompts. We contend that the Memorials rhetoric affirms contemporary U.S. imperialism under the revered sign of World War II, “speaking” more about the present than about the past. We argue that this interpretation forwards important issues for memory studies, about assessing the ethical and political legitimacy of particular renditions of the past in the present.

Foucault’s Ethics

Foucault’s most important contribution to ethics is a theoretical framework he developed for historical times and places—Hellenistic Greece, Imperial Rome, and early Christianity. The same lens he used to uncover the ethical systems at work in the discourse of others Foucault uses to examine his own work also. It reveals a normative ethics embedded in his material with three dimensions: (a) the importance of reflective and nonjudgmental communication, (b) the necessity of resisting domination, and (c) creating new, alternative relationships. His framework has potential for examining various ethical systems in a comparative manner while taking each one seriously.

How to read “how to get published” 1

This essay is a rhetorical/ideological reading of the 1993 article, “How to Get Published,” by James W. Chesebro. The authors argue that that essay is a disciplinary manifesto advancing particular values of professional community as well as of research. “How to Get Published,” they suggest, reveals militantly conventionalizing aspects of the disciplinary communitys authority structure, sense of history, material conditions of labor, and socialization patterns. By promoting these in a normative, prescriptive, “helping” document, “How to Get Published” works against, not for, the interests of those attempting to “get published.”

Mood of the Material War Memory and Imagining Otherwise

This essay explores the commemorative site of Fleury-devant-Douaumont (Fleury), a village destroyed during the battle of Verdun in 1916. We argue that Fleury offers a creative rhetoric of imagining otherwise by rendering a doubled demand on the imagination. It provokes visitors to attend to the fact of war’s overwhelming destructiveness. And simultaneously, it urges them to imagine the counterfactual, the “not having happened”—Fleury as a tiny and vibrant community as it would have been in the absence of war. In doing so, Fleury’s rhetoric opposes itself to a stance that sanitizes, justifies, or glorifies war.