Rhetorical Landscapes
in America
Variations on a Theme from
Kenneth Burke
Gregory Clark
At the same time a reading of Kenneth Burke and of tourist landscapes in America,
Gregory Clark’s new study explores the rhetorical power connected with American
tourism. Looking specifically at a time when citizens of the United States first took to rail
and then highway to become sightseers in their own country, Clark traces the rhetorical
function of a wide-ranging set of tourist experiences. He explores how the symbolic ex p eriences Americans share as tourists have helped residents of a vast and diverse nation
adopt a national identity. In doing so he suggests that the rhetorical power of a national
culture is wielded not only by public discourse but also by public experiences.
Clark examines places in the American landscape that have facilitated such experiences, including New York City, Shaker villages, Yellowstone National Park, the Lincoln
Highway, San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and the Grand
Canyon. He examines the rhetorical power of these sites to transform private individuals into public citizens, and he evaluates a national culture that teaches Americans to
experience certain places as potent symbols of national community.
Invoking Burke’s concept of “identification” to explain such rhetorical encounters,
Clark considers Burke’s lifelong study of symbols—linguistic and otherwise—and their
place in the construction and transformation of individual identity. Clark turns to Burke’s
work to expand our awareness of the rhetorical resources that lead individuals within a
community to adopt a collective identity, and he considers the implications of nineteenthand twentieth-century tourism for both visual rhetoric and the rhetoric of display.
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication
Thomas W. Benson, series editor
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GREGORY CLARK studies rhetoric and the
variety of ways that it operates in American
culture. He is the author of D i a l og u e,
Dialectic, and Conversation: A Social
Perspective on the Function of Writing and
coeditor of Oratorical Culture in NineteenthCentury America: Transformations in the
Theory and Practice of Rhetoric. Clark is a
professor of English at Brigham Young
University and is editor of Rhetoric Society
Quarterly. He lives in Provo, Utah.
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