John Louis Lucaites

Robert Hariman

Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy

No Caption Needed

Celeste Michelle Condit

Sally Caudill

This indispensable text brings together important essays on the themes, issues, and controversies that have shaped the development of rhetorical theory since the late 1960s. An extensive introduction and epilogue by the editors thoughtfully examine the current state of the field and its future directions, focusing in particular on how theorists are negotiating the tensions between modernist and postmodernist considerations. Each of the volume's eight main sections comprises a brief explanatory introduction, four to six essays selected for their enduring significance, and suggestions for further reading. Topics addressed include problems of defining rhetoric, the relationship between rhetoric and epistemology, the rhetorical situation, reason and public morality, the nature of the audience, the role of discourse in social change, rhetoric in the mass media, and challenges to rhetorical theory from the margins. An extensive subject index facilitates comparison of key concepts and principles across all of the essays featured.

A Reader

Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

In this book, Hariman and Lucaites provide an account of how photojournalism creates a distinctive and valuable way of understanding the modern world, plus example of how the public spectator can think about and with photographs in order to develop that understanding. Coming off the banner success of their No Caption Needed (2007), The Public Image takes that book forward with the express purpose of promoting visual literacy as a civic skill. In the end they aim to enlarge the conceptual scope of photography as a mode of experience, a medium for social thought, and a public art. Public thought needs both good writing and good photography, and this indicates the contemporary shift in talk about photography from what photographs are to a more direct concern with what photographs do. The authors take up a series of Big Issues, such as the recorded image as real and as artifice, the tangle of photography with modernity (here they touch on digitization and globalization), the manner in which the photograph operates as a medium for social thought, the photograph s intimate relationship with warfare, and they conclude with a chapter on the supersaturation of the image world (abundance is an important theme, and characteristic sign of cultural vitality)."

Photography and Civic Spectatorship

The Public Image

A Case Study of the Rhetorical Dimensions of Legitimacy

Flexibility and Consistency in Eighteenth-century Anglo-Whiggism

Jon Simons

In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance. For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans. Yet, the normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.

The Culture of War in Twenty-first-Century America

In/visible War

Carolyn Calloway-Thomas

"This stimulating book consists of nine essays—preceded by an instructive introduction and followed by a useful bibliography—[and] the authors not only show the effectiveness of King's rhetoric, but they also place each of his works in historical context." —Journal of American History "The essays range from windy city to thunder road, from temple to garbage truck, from judicious inferences drawn from a remarkable array of primary sources to worshipful scrutiny of oratorical text. Several authors stress the relative merit and impact of Dr. King's oral works. Students of King's thought, idiom, deficiencies, and triumphs should examine the insightful and provocative findings in this carefully edited book." —Georgia Historical Quarterly

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse

John Louis Lucaites

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