Rhetorical analyses of collective memory study how perceptions of a shared past are maintained through public texts. This analysis explores an alternative relationship between rhetoric and remembrance. Rather than study the textual form of public memory alone, I argue that communities actively interpret artifacts of public discourse as public memory. The most enduring form of this practice is ceremonial repetition, or the deliberate recitation of a text during moments of communal observance. When performed effectively, ceremonial repetition imagines a text by highlighting a resonant virtue through public reading. Such strategies to mold the meaning of a text occur through a variety of messages adjoining recitation, such as formal speech, visual display, written testament, or spatial and bodily enactment. Ceremonial repetition illustrates the extensional evolution and legacy of speech in the public imagination. In a range of historically grounded case studies, this work explores the effectiveness and dominant strategies of ceremonial repetition different eras of American public discourse. These examples include the rhetorical invocation of a text within the discursive space of repetition, illustrated in Frederick Douglass’s August First orations on the Emancipation Proclamation in the late nineteenth-century; the pairing of visual icons and ceremonial repetition, as exemplified in official and public readings of George Washington’s Farewell Address within the context of a political flag display during the Civil War; the disjunction of repetition and written reflection, as evidenced by the U.S. Senate’s institutional recitation of the Farewell Address on Washington’s birthday; and the emerging genre of repetition performed through multiple voices and resonant scenery, as clarified in a variety of modern performances, such as the reading of the “I Have a Dream” speech by elementary school students celebrating the King holiday. These case studies illuminate various strategies used to translate past words by constraining their meaning for the needs of the present. Though ceremonial repetition offers audiences the opportunity to reconstitute a text’s properties and public legacy, this study concludes that such epideictic practice is most effective during moments of perceived crisis wherein core tenets of a political culture are profoundly questioned or disrupted.

Sir John A. Macdonald has been a political figure frequently referenced in Canadian history. Yet no study has explored the evolution of his public memory. This study provides a focused examination of the attempts by Canada’s federal political parties to shape Macdonald’s public memory. The period of study began immediately following the death of Sir John A. Macdonald on June 6, 1891 and continued until the Centennial Celebrations of Confederation in 1967. The study first aims to identify and analyze events and activities organized or supported by Canada’s federal political class which allowed them opportunities to shape Macdonald’s public memory. The study then explores through the lens of official memory their motivation to engage in his commemoration and to shape his memory in specific ways. The objective of this study is to answer two specific research questions. The first asked if Canada’ federal political leaders were interested and successful in shaping Macdonald’s public memory during the period of study to allow the emergence of a seemingly national hegemonic figure acceptable to both political parties. The second asked if the federal political parties’ attempts to depict Macdonald as a unifying national symbol were picked up in the media in Ontario and Quebec and in both official languages, thereby reinforcing his hegemonic status for the federal political class. The study argues that Macdonald became on a single occasion a seemingly national hegemonic figure acceptable to both political parties and to the media in both official language communities in Ontario and Quebec. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2010-12-22 15:44:13.807

This study of commemoration of 9/11 on the 10th anniversary is performed at the intersection of public memory and rhetorical studies. Examining the role of the individual within public memory, this study furthers both fields by expanding on the definitions, processes, and negotiation between official and vernacular discourse. With a theoretical frame work that uses Foucault's concept of discursive archive, rhetors involved in the creation of public memory are framed as curators of a discursive archive of 9/11 memory. The role and limitations of the curatorial role is explored in three cases studies: a local ceremony, national newspapers, and Twitter hashtags. The study finds that there is a complicated interaction between vernacular and official memory and narrow definitions of the terms are not sufficient to describe the processes through which individuals take part in public memory. Rhetors involved in the public memory process may take on complex and ambiguous roles within the entangled discourses of official and vernacular memory. Within these case studies, individual curators crafted messages about the 10th anniversary of 9/11 that reify the importance of individuals tied to particular groups, urge for unity, and focus on the ten years since the tragedies.

In my dissertation, I analyze the implications of public memories used to encourage the forgetting of women veterans’ war efforts and offer up a critical praxis of remembering differently in order to challenge normative memorial practices. Remembering differently is informed by rhetorical and feminist theories because it is a critical performance that reclaims forgotten memories; interrogates systems of power, such as gender; and seeks to add to, edit, reread, and remember public memories of individuals who have been silenced, erased, and appropriated. I argue that prevailing war memorialization of women bolsters nationalistic and patriarchal ideologies by framing female veterans as only being trailblazing patriots who have broken the glass ceiling, while downplaying servicewomen’s lived experiences with PTSD, sexual assault, sexism, and job discrimination in the military. As a result, these depoliticized memories reinforce hegemonic beliefs that situate social, political, and economical injustices in the past rather than as present day concerns. In each chapter, I analyze how U.S. female veterans are remembering differently their military experiences with personal memories of war in public performances. The veterans’ acts of commemoration move beyond the heroic narrative of warriors breaking down barriers and interrogate issues relevant to female soldiers like sexism, assault, job discrimination, PTSD, and homelessness. My thesis is not simply advocating for “more remembering” in order to achieve some semblance of equality, because I do not believe more representation necessarily results in more pronounced individual rights. Rather, my purpose is to examine the rhetorical functions, opportunities, and constraints of remembering differently, in particular, for female veterans who are actively articulating patriotic and dissenting commemorative discourses.

In 1861, the U.S. Congress, responding to the growing number of Civil War dead, passed legislation regulating the burial practices of the Union Army. Six years later, the legislative body established a government-administered national cemetery system (NCS) that only interred Union soldiers killed in action. Subsequent pressure, from veterans groups, families, concerned citizens, and Congress led to the expansion of the institution’s eligibility regulations and funerary landscapes. As the product of over a century and a half of political and social negotiations, the NCS now consists of nearly 200 cemeteries, on domestic and foreign soil, that inter a vast array of individuals whom the government has deemed patriots. Drawing on cultural history, memory studies, anthropology, and art history, “These Honored Dead” illustrates how the NCS evolved from necessary wartime burial grounds into a federal memorial institution whose activities defined and announced the nations’ geographic, political, and social boundaries. Through an administrative and cultural history of the institution, this dissertation considers how Americans from diverse backgrounds and within divergent historical contexts have turned to the NCS to understand their individual and national identities and ideals. I look to the institution’s funerary landscapes as physical and affective evidence of how the federal government and the U.S. citizenry negotiate social and political relations. In the process, I interrogate “whose deaths matter?” to the national democratic mission. I argue that by developing national cemeteries and maintaining exclusionary interment regulations, the federal government announced a racialized, gendered, and politicized hierarchy of national belonging. The persistence of the NCS demonstrates that the nation mourns and memorializes patriotic sacrifice, regardless of martial victory, to make sense of contemporary anxieties. This dissertation illustrates the ways that the federal government mediates cultural and social politics, alongside its own interests, to construct a politically and socially useful memorial embodiment of patriotic sacrifice.

This project investigates how rhetorical texts influenced the witch trials that were held in Salem in 1691-1692, how rhetoric shaped the response to this event, and how rhetorical artifacts in the twentieth and twenty first centuries have shaped American public memory of the Salem witchcraft crisis. My analysis draws from three different chronological and rhetorical viewpoints. In Chapter II, I build upon work done by scholars such as McGee, White, and Charland in the area of constitutive rhetoric to address the question of how the witchcraft crisis was initiated and fueled rhetorically. Then, as my examination shifts to the rhetorical artifacts constructed immediately after the trials in Chapter III, I rely on the tradition of apologia, rooted in the ancient Greek understanding of stasis theory to understand how rhetorical elements were utilized by influential rhetors to craft a variety of different explanations for the crisis. And finally in Chapter IV, I draw from individuals such as Halbwachs, Kammen, Zelizer, and Bodnar, working in the cross-disciplinary field of public memory, to respond to the questions of how we remember the trials today and what impact these memories have on our understanding of the themes of witchcraft and witch hunting in contemporary American society. Therefore, this project uses the lens of rhetorical analysis to provide a method for examining and understanding how individuals, both in the seventeenth century and today, have engaged in the act of updating their reflections about this facet of American history.

abstract: The struggle of the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) to make space for women’s history in the United States is in important ways emblematic of the struggle for recognition and status of American women as a whole. Working at the intersections of digital-material memory production and using the NWHM as a focus, this dissertation examines the significance of the varied strategies used by and contexts among which the NWHM and entities like it negotiate for digital, material, and rhetorical space within U.S. public memory production. As a “cybermuseum,” the NWHM functions within national public memory production at the intersections of material and digital culture; yet as an activist institution in search of a permanent, physical “home” for women’s history, the NWHM also counterproductively reifies existing gendered norms that make such an achievement difficult. By examining selected aspects of this complexly situated entity, this dissertation makes visible the gendered nature of public memory production, the digital and material components of that production, and the hybrid nature of emerging public memory entities which operate simultaneously in multiple spheres. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and guided by Carole Blair’s work on rhetorical materiality, this dissertation explores key aspects of the NWHM’s process of becoming, including an examination of the centrality of the interpellation of publics to the rhetorical materiality of public discourse; an analysis of the material state of public memory production in national history museums in the U.S.; and an exploration of the embodied engagement that undergirds all interaction with and presentation of historical artifacts and narratives, whether digital, physical or both at once. In a synthesis of findings, this dissertation describes a set of key characteristics through which certain hybrid digital-material entities (including the NWHM) enact increasingly complex variations of rhetorical agency. These characteristics suggest a need for a more flexible analytic framework, described in the final chapter. This framework takes shape as an heuristic of functions across which digital-material entities always already enact a situated, active, embodied, and simultaneous agency, one that can account fully for the rhetorical processes through which space is “made” for women in U.S. public memory. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2017

abstract: In the countries of Eastern Europe, the recent history of the communist regimes creates a context rich in various and often times contradictory remembering practices. While normative discourses of memory enacted in official forms of memory such as museums, memorials, monuments, or commemorative rituals attempt to castigate the communism in definite terms, remembering practices enacted in everyday life are more ambiguous and more tolerant of various interpretations of the communist past. This study offers a case study of the ways in which people remember communism in everyday life in Romania. While various inquiries into Eastern Europe's and also Romania's official and intentional forms of memorializing communism abound, few works address remembering practices in their entanglements with everyday life. From a methodological point of view, this study integrates a grounded methodology approach with a rhetorical sensitivity to explore the discourses, objects, events, and practices of remembering communism in Bucharest, the capital city of Romania. In doing so, this inquiry attends not only to the aspects of the present that animate the remembering of communism, but also and more specifically to the set of practices by which the remembering process is performed. The qualitative analysis revealed a number of conceptual categories that clustered around three major themes that describe the entanglements of remembering activities with everyday life. Relating the present to the past, sustaining the past in the present, and pursuing the communist past constitute the ways in which people in Romania live their relationships with the communist past in a way that reveals the complex interplay between private and public forms of memory, but also between the political, social, and cultural aspects of the remembering process. These themes also facilitate a holistic understanding of the rhetorical environment of remembering communism in Romania. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication 2014

This dissertation examines American Civil War tourist spaces in order to describe how epideictic rhetoric has distinct spatial functions that affect the identity of tourists. Through an analysis of three Civil War spaces in Virginia--Lexington, Appomattox Court House, and the Museum of the Confederacy--I argue epideictic space is a locus of invention that has the performative power to create community, public memory, and a vision of the future through the movement of bodies in space. Through a consubstantial ethos established between space and audience, epideictic creates kairotic space and time by collapsing past, present, and future in order to create a narrative history with which the community can identify. This study traces rhetoric related to the Confederate flag, slavery, nationalism, and reconciliation through an analysis of the Civil War spaces in which these discourses are embodied. I suggest that creating a productive rhetoric of blame starts through connecting blame, such as remembering slavery, to the materiality of space and through creating narratives of responsibility that connect memory to a vision of the future. / Ph. D.

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