Ekaterina V. Haskins

Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age

In sizing up the notion of public memory, rhetoricians would be remiss not to consider the increasing influence of new media on todays remembrance culture. This article addresses memorial functions of the internet in light of recent scholarly debates about virtues and drawbacks of modern “archival memory” as well as the paradoxical link between the contemporary public obsession with memory and the acceleration of amnesia. To explore the strengths and limitations of the internet as a vehicle of collecting, preserving, and displaying traces of the past, the article examines The September 11 Digital Archive, a comprehensive online effort to document public involvement in recording and commemorating the tragedy of 11 September, 2001.

Put Your Stamp on History: The USPS Commemorative Program Celebrate the Century

This essay offers a reading of one of the largest public commemorative projects in recent U.S. history, the Celebrate the Century stamp program, in order to explore the ambivalent potential of collective memory in postmodernity. Celebrate the Century exhibits the tension between aesthetic and political heterogeneity, on the one hand, and the tendency toward commodification and political amnesia, on the other. The essay develops by considering the evolution of commemorative postal iconography and its relation to postmodern simulacra, the process of selection of stamp subjects for Celebrate the Century , and the array of display strategies that helped to frame the collection as a commodity, the public as tourists, and history as progress toward consumer democracy.

Metonymy and the Metropolis: Television Show Settings and the Image of New York City

This article argues that contemporary portrayals of cityscapes on television create a “postcard effect,” a way of seeing that affords the viewer the pleasureofa tourist gaze. This disposition both reflects and legitimizes a fragmented experience of visiting a location without immersing oneself in the intricacies of its politics and geography. Building on critical urban studies, film theory, semiotics, and critical ethnography, this article analyzes depictions of New York City in five television shows (Seinfeld, Friends, Sex and the City, Felicity, and The Sopranos) to demonstrate how metonymic representations of the city produce a narrative of a tourist destination on display.

Pop (Up) Goes the Blind Date: Supertextual Constraints on “Reality” Television:

In this textual analysis of the reality dating show Blind Date, the authors challenge the recent cultural studies scholarship that champions textual openness of reality television. In particular, the authors demonstrate how the pop-up supertext in Blind Date undermines the counterhegemonic potential of this show with regard to gender, class, and ethnic representations. The authors find that the interplay between the comic supertext and the dating coverage tends to punish deviance from dominant conceptions of aesthetics, class, social, and intellectual abilities. The analysis highlights the limits of textual polysemy in the new generation of interactive or enhanced television formats.

Choosing between Isocrates and Aristotle: Disciplinary Assumptions and Pedagogical Implications

This essay examines several disciplinary and pedagogical assumptions behind Aristotles centrality in the classical rhetorical canon and calls for a reconsideration of the established hierarchical relation of Aristotle to Isocrates.

Places of Protest in Putin’s Russia: Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer and Show Trial

In spring 2012 the Russian feminist art collective Pussy Riot became world famous when five of its members were arrested for their “Punk Prayer for Freedom” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in central Moscow. Western media swiftly embraced the group and celebrated it as an icon of youthful female rebellion against Putin’s authoritarian regime. Yet the Western reception largely obscured the “regional accent” of the group’s protest rhetoric. This article seeks to restore this regional accent by foregrounding the rhetorical significance of place in Pussy Riot’s acts of protest.

Totalitarian Visual “Monologue”: Reading Soviet Posters with Bakhtin

Contemporary scholarship has noted Mikhail M. Bakhtins apparent animosity toward rhetoric. Bakhtins distinction between monologue and dialogue helps to explain his view of rhetoric, which is both hostile and receptive—hostile to monologic rhetoric but receptive to a dialogic rhetoric that is responsive to others. This article reads Bakhtins account of monologue and dialogue as a reaction to the pervasive totalitarian visual rhetoric of the Soviet state. Drawing on Bakhtins descriptions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and various kinds of double-voiced discourse—parody, satire, and polemic—the article analyzes the workings of Soviet visual rhetoric as both monologic and potentially dialogic and recovers the various forms of otherness displaced by this rhetoric.

Accidental tourists: Visiting ephemeral war memorials

How a memorial impacts public memory depends not just on its symbolic appeals but also on how it gains the attention of visitors and how those appeals convert visitors into engaged participants. Although numerous studies have explored visitors’ performances at sites of memory, this scholarship has largely overlooked what we call “the accidental tourist,” the would-be visitor who had not planned to visit a site of memory but ended up doing so because of the site’s proximity to another existing attraction or daily route. Building on research into the performances of memory at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, we expand inquiry into the way memorials attract and engage visitors by studying two temporary memorials to the cost of the Iraq War. We demonstrate how these memorials gain attention and prompt the engagement of “accidental tourists” through temporal and spatial tactics as well as both overt and subtle cues for visitors to interact with the site, organizers, and other visitors.

Locating memory in an age of dislocation

From the outset, I must admit the sheer impossibility of surveying the vast landscape of memory studies, even if I were to narrow down my scope to “culture” and “difference.” It seems much less daunting to reflect on major frameworks that memory scholars employ to explain mechanisms of cultural belonging and identity. As Kenneth Burke (1966, p. 45) reminds us, every theoretical terminology constitutes a “screen” that guides the “selection of reality” and produces insights based on this selection. Each insight, however, entails a corresponding kind of blindness, since “selection” necessarily leaves something out. What follows, then, is not a reconstruction of a tradition of scholarship but an abbreviated assessment of the possibilities and limitations of a few key terms in memory studies. Setting aside the bewildering variety of things that have come to be designated by the term “memory,” we can begin by focusing on the term itself as a signifier of cultural belonging. Memory studies as a field traces its origins to French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’s conceptualization of collective memory in his Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire ([1925] 1994). The impetus for Halbwachs’s study was the cultural and psychological dislocation as a consequence of World War I and industrialization. Returning war veterans and uprooted peasants often lacked the social and affective contexts necessary to make sense of their traumatic experiences. This led Halbwachs to “question the complex relations between uprooting, interpersonal exchanges, and the process of memorization” (Apfelbaum, 2010, p. 82). Halbwachs’s insistence on “collective” as a modifier of memory underscored the impossibility of remembering one’s own past without the support of a social group. By the same token, history as an academic enterprise—which it became in the 19th century—was premised on the abstraction of past events as historical facts from their social environments and their cataloguing by impartial professionals. Memory was thus distinguished from both psychology and history. Although Halbwachs’s characterization of history and memory as polar opposites does not hold sway any longer (for historiography as an intellectual enterprise has become attuned to vicissitudes of memory and politics), his notion of memory as a framework of shared symbols and traditions remains relevant in the age of globalization, mass migration, and struggles for cultural and political recognition. For a variety of historical and political reasons, “memory” did not attain currency as a subject of academic study until the 1980s. It was heralded, among others, by historian Pierre Nora’s introduction to a monumental anthology of essays on French cultural memory, Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–1992). Nora followed Halbwachs in identifying

Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information / Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being

A few years ago, The Onion, Americas finest (satirical) news source, issued a warning: “Report: 90% of Waking Hours Spent Staring at Glowing Rectangles.” The article enumerated the ways that human...