Rhetorical Landscapes

Kevin (Kyoo Sang) Jo

Professor Ellen Quandahl

RWS 602 Weekly Paper 4

February 19, 2014

Gregory Clark

1. Clark’s book is about “rhetorical landscapes.” Landscape, he says, is not the same as land (9). Work out this distinction. 

According to his words, land is material, a particular object, while landscape is conceptual. And he also says that land becomes landscape when it is assigned the role of symbol, and as symbol it functions rhetorically. Therefore, landscape is rhetorical term. In other words, when landscape is called, it might work in the rhetorical perspective. It could symbolize a common home, enable people to have a common image, and construct a common identity. 

2. Note other key terms that Clark borrows/forwards/extends in order to set up his case study of early tourist guides of New York written for children.

(1) Public discourse: 

 To prompt those who constitute that collective to adopt for themselves that set of attitudes and assumptions, values and beliefs – and coordinated actions – that are the elements of a public identity

 An exchange of “debate, discussion and persuasion.”

(2) Epidictic rhetoric:

 A narrative that invites the “formation of a community of minds” in those it addresses

 It presents images of actions that express a publicly established, shared sense of “the common dwelling place” that “enfolds participants” who together compose a public.

(3) Scene of pentad:

 A primary term that encompasses as well as shapes and constrains each of the others: act, agent, agency, and purpose.

 If it is understood to be the social context of any act, it clearly provides a rich explanatory resource for the act’s public meanings and social functions.

 It prompts people to transform, imaginatively at least, the meaning of actors and the actions within it.

(4) Landscape:

 “A composition of man-made or man-modified spaces” that serves, either imaginatively or actually, “as infrastructure and background for our collective existence”

 A “background” or context that offers us an immediate and concrete sense of “not only our identity and presence but also our history”

(5) Representative anecdote:

 Shared interpretations of the situations

 It enables people to identify with each other and cooperate.

 It comes to symbolize the important experiences that individuals share, those individuals treat it as common reference point that enables people to understand themselves as sharing a situation and scene.

 It provides a collective of people with terms it can use to articulate the essential elements of a situation its members share. 

(6) Kairos:

 The notion of the full complexity of a rhetorical occasion

 The sum total of ‘context’ that influence the translation of thought into language and meaning in any rhetorical situation

 The ‘scene’ of rhetoric in Burkean terms

3. How do you understand Clark’s overall argument about the publicizing of New York as a “paradigmatic” experience that constitutes common American identity?

It is interesting that Clark argues that collective identity as Americans was developed through shared understanding as gained by experiencing the landscape, vicariously and physically. Moreover, he extends Burkean terms such as “scene” and “representative anecdote” to explain how experiences of place create public identity rhetorically. Just as Burke treats “scene,” as primary, to the extent that it encompasses as well as shapes and constrains “act” and “agent,” Clark views a place as a function of social symbols. In other words, places present people with images and experiences of collective life within which those individuals are invited to locate themselves – to make themselves at home. Also, adapting Burke’s concept of “representative anecdote,” Clark describes as a “representative place” one where people experience themselves as identified with the particular characteristics of the community that the place has come to symbolize. Clark successfully argues that New York City is a representative American place that provides its visitors with paradigmatic experiences – negative as well as positive – of public life in America by giving various examples of picture books and guidebooks. These examples demonstrate the rhetorical power of picturesque experiences and enhance his overall argument. 

4. As always, pose questions about specific passages and/or note connections among our texts for today.

In his essay, Clark provides a variety of terms that seem like similar, for example, scene, landscape, place, or public identity, collective identity, or experience of place, picturesque experience, and so on. Even though he might try to explain his argument easily, it is confusing and not helpful to understand his argument to me. I am wondering what difference between those terms is.