Essay looking backwardWould you want to live in Edward Bellamy’.docx

Essay: looking backward
Would you want to live in Edward Bellamy’s utopia?
Based on your reading of Looking Backward, what was
Bellamy’s critique of the world of Andrew Carnegie and John
Rockefeller? Why do you think that Bellamy’s vision of the
future was so popular in the late 19th-century United States of
America?
Instruction
How to write your class essays
You are responsible for five responses to the five primary
source books. Each of these should be around 750 words long,
double spaced. They should consist of three parts.
1. Exposition. Your first paragraph should describe the book,
and briefly explain what you have decided about one or more of
questions that I have posed.
2. Development. The middle of your essay should explain your
answer. It should offer details about the main arguments and
content of the book to support your claims. It should also offer
background from Give Me Liberty!
3. Conclusion. Your last paragraph should recapitulate your
argument, and add some final point that you think bolsters your
perspective.
Don't be reluctant to use phases like "in this essay I argue . . . "
or "I think that . . . " or "in conclusion, I believe that . . . "
Quote from the book when you find some passage that
illustrates your points. Use your Give Me Liberty! textbook to
provide background, or to add additional quotes. But don't over-
quote from either of the books. Use your own words. And don't
just copy passages from the books or other sources verbatim as
if they were your own, that's plagiarism.
As for your reference style, just use a paragraph format
(Bellamy, 125) or (Foner, 353).
Your teaching assistants will grade your papers from 100 to
zero.

High grades (90+) will go to focused papers that emphasize a
strong argument backed by clear references. These papers also
pay attention to correct spelling and grammar.
Medium grades (80-99) will go to competent papers that touch
on the questions, but with less focus, organization, or reference
backing.
Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public
Culture
Author(s): John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman
Source: Rhetoric Review, Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (Spring, 2001), pp.
37-42
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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The Changing Culture of Rhetorical Studies The Changing
Culture of Rhetorical Studies
Andrew King is HopKins Professor of Communication and
Chair of the Department of Speech
Communication at Louisiana State University. He is past editor
of SCJ (1993-1996) and is present
editor of QJS. He is the author of several books and articles, is
the past President of the Kenneth
Burke Society (1996-1999), and received his doctorate under
Robert L. Scott.
John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman
Indiana University
Culture
Rhetoricians have traditionally focused their attention on the
power of the
word as it is enacted in public contexts. More recently,
increasing attention has

been devoted to the rhetoric of the image (Barthes; Mitchell), or
what is being
dubbed "visual rhetoric." Visual rhetoric refers to a large body
of visual and ma-
terial practices, from architecture to cartography and from
interior design to pub-
lic memorials (e.g., see Blair; Foss; Twigg; MacDonald;
Mirzeoff; Stafford).
The focus of our own work in visual rhetoric is twentieth-
century American
photojournalism and, more particularly still, those photographs
that have
achieved the status of iconicity. "Iconic photographs" are
photographic images
produced in print, electronic, or digital media that are (1)
recognized by every-
one within a public culture, (2) understood to be representations
of historically
significant events, (3) objects of strong emotional identification
or response, and
(4) regularly reproduced or copied across a range of media,
genres, and topics
(Hariman and Lucaites). Examples abound and should come
readily to mind: the
"Migrant Mother" with her children staring into the camera
amidst the Great
Depression, six marines raising an American flag on Iwo Jima,
the na-
palm-scorched body of a naked Vietnamese girl running from
the blast, the ae-
rial display of plumes of smoke as the Challenger explodes, and
so on.
We hope to explain the role that iconic photographs play in
American, lib-
eral-democratic public culture. We begin by assuming that such

photographs re-
flect social knowledge and dominant ideologies, shape and
mediate understand-
ing of specific events and periods (both at the time of their
initial enactment and
subsequently as they are recollected within a tableau of public
memory), influ-
ence political behavior and identity, and provide inventional
(figurative) re-
Andrew King is HopKins Professor of Communication and
Chair of the Department of Speech
Communication at Louisiana State University. He is past editor
of SCJ (1993-1996) and is present
editor of QJS. He is the author of several books and articles, is
the past President of the Kenneth
Burke Society (1996-1999), and received his doctorate under
Robert L. Scott.
John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman
Indiana University
Culture
Rhetoricians have traditionally focused their attention on the
power of the
word as it is enacted in public contexts. More recently,
increasing attention has
been devoted to the rhetoric of the image (Barthes; Mitchell), or
what is being
dubbed "visual rhetoric." Visual rhetoric refers to a large body
of visual and ma-
terial practices, from architecture to cartography and from
interior design to pub-
lic memorials (e.g., see Blair; Foss; Twigg; MacDonald;

Mirzeoff; Stafford).
The focus of our own work in visual rhetoric is twentieth-
century American
photojournalism and, more particularly still, those photographs
that have
achieved the status of iconicity. "Iconic photographs" are
photographic images
produced in print, electronic, or digital media that are (1)
recognized by every-
one within a public culture, (2) understood to be representations
of historically
significant events, (3) objects of strong emotional identification
or response, and
(4) regularly reproduced or copied across a range of media,
genres, and topics
(Hariman and Lucaites). Examples abound and should come
readily to mind: the
"Migrant Mother" with her children staring into the camera
amidst the Great
Depression, six marines raising an American flag on Iwo Jima,
the na-
palm-scorched body of a naked Vietnamese girl running from
the blast, the ae-
rial display of plumes of smoke as the Challenger explodes, and
so on.
We hope to explain the role that iconic photographs play in
American, lib-
eral-democratic public culture. We begin by assuming that such
photographs re-
flect social knowledge and dominant ideologies, shape and
mediate understand-
ing of specific events and periods (both at the time of their
initial enactment and
subsequently as they are recollected within a tableau of public
memory), influ-

ence political behavior and identity, and provide inventional
(figurative) re-
37 37
2014 15:09:13 PM
Rhetoric Review
sources for subsequent communicative action. Additionally, we
believe that they
mark fundamental relationships between the practice of
photojournalism and
twentieth-century American democratic public culture. It is this
last theme that
we will sketch out here as a way of suggesting one avenue of
current work in vi-
sual rhetoric and its implication for contemporary rhetorical
studies.
The key point we wish to advance is that in general,
photojournalism under-
writes liberal-democratic public culture. From Plato to Neal
Postman (Plato;
Jay; Postman), Western philosophers and social critics alike
have expressed a
deep and abiding fear of the threat that visual practices pose to
the public's de-
liberative capacity for rational decision-making. By contrast, we
argue that the
practice of photojournalism operates as a political aesthetic

(Hariman, cf.
Hartley) that provides crucial social, emotional, and mnemonic
resources for an-
imating the collective identity and action necessary to a liberal-
democratic poli-
tics (Zelizer).
One possible response to this problem, which emerges in a
number of twenti-
eth-century iconic photographs, is the "individuated aggregate"
(Lucaites 278-80;
Hariman and Lucaites). The individuated aggregate is a trope
whereby the popula-
tion as a whole is represented solely by specific individuals.
This is the contrary
tendency of democracies to aggregate individual actions, such
as votes or public
opinion polls; instead, the impetus for action comes from acting
as if an aggregate
were an individual. Think here in particular of Dorothea Lange's
"Migrant
Mother," a photograph shot in 1936 at the height of the Great
Depression in which a
migrant pea picker sits holding her scared children while staring
back at the viewer
in a display of both victimage and strength. The photograph
activates the tension
between individual worth and collective identity at a moment of
severe economic
crisis by representing a common fear that transcends class and
gender and by defin-
ing the viewer as one who can marshal collective resources to
combat fear localized
by class, gender, and family relations. It allows one to
acknowledge paralyzing fear
at the same time that it triggers an impulse to do something

about it. This formal de-
sign reveals an implicit movement from the aestheticization of
poverty to a rhetori-
cal engagement with the audience, from a compelling portrait to
compelling action
by the audience on behalf of the class of subjects depicted. The
problem of poverty
will not be solved by helping only the migrant mother, but any
state action is un-
likely to gain support if it cannot be assented to by citizens
habituated to see them-
selves as individuals first and last.
Iconic photographs are especially revealing in this regard, for
among other
things, they contribute to the representation and constitution of
specific concep-
tions of civic identity that have developed as key features of
liberal-democratic
polity. The articulation of liberal-democracy in American public
culture operates
in an apparently irresolvable tension between individual
sovereignty and collec-
38
2014 15:09:13 PM
The Changing Culture of Rhetorical Studies 39
"Migrant Mother"

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-
USF34-9058C]
2014 15:09:13 PM
Rhetoric Review
tive agency. The individual is the locus of value, but the
collective is the locus of
power. Models of civic identity are thus caught at any given
moment between af-
firming the self but catering to class interests, or heralding
individual autonomy
but legitimizing public authority, or celebrating competition but
reassuring those
who lose. These tensions are especially pronounced during
moments of crisis
and disaster such as war or economic depression, where any
political response
has to be oriented toward large-scale measures designed to meet
needs defined
in the aggregate, while still maintaining the ideological
commitment to the pri-
macy of the individual.
In a liberal-democratic public culture increasingly dominated by
collective
enterprises, the continual reproduction of such iconic
photographs maintain the
form of individual agency while habituating the public to
institutional manage-

ment of collective behavior. For those who initially encountered
the "Migrant
Mother" in the 1930s, it captured a profound, generalized sense
of vulnerability
while simultaneously providing a localized means for breaking
its spell through
state action. With the passage of time, the photograph has
become an icon for
the Great Depression and the New Deal policies instituted to
deal with it, an
aide-memoire for activating a "structure of feeling" (Williams)
that helps to col-
lapse past and present so as to legitimate a particular response
to the tension be-
tween the individual and the collective at moments of crisis and
despair. In one
such example drawn from the 1970s, the "Migrant Mother" was
appropriated by
a Black Panther artist who rendered the photograph as a drawing
that racialized
the mother and her children, thus drawing from the original
photograph's char-
acterization of unwarranted victimage and its moral appeal for
state action to the
relationship between race and economic oppression (Heyman
61). Explicit re-
productions of the photograph are numerous, appearing in
everything from pop-
ular histories and textbooks invoking the Great Depression to
advertisements for
an A&E television documentary, titled "California and the
Dream Seekers." A
particularly interesting reproduction occurred in President
Clinton's 1996 cam-
paign film "A Place Called America" (Bloodworth-Thomason),
where the photo-

graph appears in the very middle of what is represented as the
American family
photo album amidst shots of military service, a clear attempt to
level the hierar-
chy in forms of national service that had been used against
Clinton due to his
lack of a military record. More recently, it was imitated on a
1999 Time maga-
zine cover that displays an ethnic Albanian woman suckling her
baby while be-
ing expelled from Kosovo ("Are Ground Troops The Answer?").
In each in-
stance the rationale remains essentially the same. Guided by an
emotional rather
than a programmatic logic, the photographs work primarily to
activate and man-
age feelings of both vulnerability and obligation that are
endemic to liberal-dem-
ocratic culture. These conventions then become standard means
of persuasion
40
2014 15:09:13 PM
The Changing Culture of Rhetorical Studies
that illustrate how people must be portrayed to be deemed
worthy of redemption
from practices of destruction accompanying the social order.

The individuated aggregate is not unique to photography, of
course, but it
seems to fit comfortably within the conventions of
photojournalistic practice that
rely on realist assumptions of representation, even as they
situate the viewer in
an emotional register that activates the tension between private
and public life.
Put somewhat differently, we conclude by suggesting that iconic
photographs
and the photojouralistic practices that they animate may well
function as a
performative ritual of civic identity in literate, liberal-
democratic societies. It is
important that we emphasize the word literate in the previous
sentence, for in
such a world the assumption is that the logos is sovereign. And
yet there is no
easy economy of words for invoking the grandeur and sublimity
of nature (or
technology), the horrors of war, or the despair of victimage, let
alone the struc-
tures of feeling that manage the paradoxical tension between
individual auton-
omy and collective authority. In illiterate societies performance
is the primary
medium through which the "unsayable" (typically the sacred) is
enacted and
given presence. By "performance" we mean to focus attention
on aesthetically
marked and intensified communicative behavior put on display
for an audience
toward the general goal of maintaining collective life (Bauman).
Photojournal-
ism (and especially the iconic photograph) seems to meet the
terms of perfor-

mance quite naturally. It is aesthetically marked, both by the
conventions of real-
ist photography and photojournalistic practices (e.g.,
perspective, placement,
captions, etc.). Its freezing of a critical moment in time
intensifies the journalis-
tic experience, focusing the viewer's attention on a particular
enactment of the
tensions that define the public culture. But more than this, it
does so ritualisti-
cally, as it repetitively conjures images of what is unsayable
(e.g., because emo-
tional) in print discourses otherwise defining the public culture.
This repetition,
in newspapers, magazines, coffee table books, textbooks,
political advertise-
ments, and so forth, provides the public audience with the
important assurances
and other resources necessary for participation in modern
democratic polity.
Works Cited
"Are Ground Troops the Answer?" Time April 12, 1999.
Barthes, Roland. "The Rhetoric of the Image." Image, Music,
Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1977. 32-51.
Bauman, Richard. "Performance." International Encyclopedia of
Communications. Vol. 3. New
York: Oxford UP, 1989. 262-66.
Blair, Carol. "Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars
of Rhetoric's Materiality." Rhetori-
cal Bodies: Toward a Material Rhetoric. Ed. Jack Selzer and

Sharon Crowley. Madison: U of
Wisconsin P, 1999. 1-35.
Bloodworth-Thomason, Linda. A Place Called America. Mozark
Productions, 1996.
41
2014 15:09:13 PM
Rhetoric Review
Foss, Sonja K. "A Rhetorical Scheme for the Evaluation of
Visual Imagery." Communication Studies
45 (1994): 213-24.
Hariman, Robert. Political Styles: The Artistry of Power.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. "Remembering How
It Was Supposed to Feel:
Photo-journalism and Emotional Remembrance in American
Public Culture." Rhetoric and Pub-
lic Memory. Ed. Stephen Browne and David Henry. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, forthcoming.
Hartley, John. The Politics of Pictures: The Creation of the
Public in the age of Popular Media. New
York: Routledge, 1992.
Heyman, Therese Thau. "Migrant Mother As Icon." Celebrating

A Collection: The Work of Dorothea
Lange. Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum. 54-66.
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
Lange, Dorothea. "Migrant Mother." Library of Congress,
February 1936. LC-USF34-9058C.
<http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print/128_migm.html>.
Lucaites, John Louis. "Visualizing 'The People': Individualism
and Collectivism in Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men." Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997):
269-89.
MacDonald, Sharon, ed. The Politics of Display: Museums,
Science, Culture. New York: Routledge,
1998.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. New
York: Routledge, 1999.
Mitchell, W. J .T. Picture Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1994.
Plato. "Republic." Plato: The Collected Works. Ed. Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1961. Bk. X, 595-608c.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse
in the Age of Show Business. New
York: Penguin, 1984.
Stafford, Barbara. Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of
Connecting. Cambridge, MA: MIT P,

1999.
Twigg, Reginald. "Aestheticizing The Home: Textual Strategies
of Taste, Self-Identity, and Bour-
geois Hegemony in America's 'Gilded Age."' Text and
Performance Quarterly 12 (1992): 1-20.
Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. New York:
Columbia UP, 1983.
Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering To Forget: Holocaust Memory
Through the Camera's Eye. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1998.
John Louis Lucaites is an associate professor in the Department
of Communication and Cul-
ture, Indiana University. His work focuses on the relationship
between rhetoric and social theory and
the critique of liberal-democratic public culture. His work
includes Crafting Equality: America's An-
glo-African Word (1993, with Celeste Condit).
Robert Hariman is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric
and Communication Studies,
Drake University. He is the author of Political Styles: The
Artistry of Power (1995) and editor of
Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media, and the Law (1990) and
Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn
in International Relations (1996, with Francis A. Beer).
42
2014 15:09:13 PM

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jspArticle
Contentsp. 37p. 38p. 39p. 40p. 41p. 42Issue Table of
ContentsRhetoric Review, Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (Spring, 2001), pp.
1-198Volume Information [pp. 180 - 187]Front Matter [pp. 1 -
4]Symposium: The Changing Culture of Rhetorical
StudiesPreface: An Allegory [pp. 5 - 9]Rhetorical Feminism
[pp. 9 - 12]Rhetorical Formations of Genetics in Science and
Society [pp. 12 - 17]Creating the "New Person": The Rhetoric
of Reconstitutive Discourse [pp. 18 - 22]Rhetorical Studies and
the Future of Postcolonial Theories and Practices [pp. 22 -
28]Evolving Protest Rhetoric: From the 1960s to the 1990s [pp.
28 - 32]Burkean Theory Reborn: How Burkean Studies
Assimilated Its Postmodern Critics [pp. 32 - 37]Visual
Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture [pp.
37 - 42]Revisiting the Rhetoric of Racism [pp. 43 - 46]History,
Culture, and Political Rhetoric [pp. 46 - 50]Readers and a
Cultural Rhetorical Studies [pp. 51 - 56]White Guy, Black
Texts: Appropriateness and Appropriation across Racial
Difference [pp. 56 - 60]Rhetorical Criticism in New Media
Environments [pp. 60 - 65]When Ideology Motivates Theory:
The Case of the Man from Weaverville [pp. 66 - 93]Effacing
Difference in the Royal Society: The Homogenizing Nature of
Disciplinary Dialogue [pp. 94 - 112]The Passion of Conviction:
Reclaiming Polemic for a Reading of Second-Wave Feminism
[pp. 113 - 129]Called to the Law: Tales of Pleasure and
Obedience [pp. 130 - 146]Making Use of the Nineteenth
Century: The Writings of Robert Connors and Recent Histories
of Rhetoric and Composition [pp. 147 - 157]Review
Essaysuntitled [pp. 158 - 161]untitled [pp. 161 - 167]untitled
[pp. 168 - 173]untitled [pp. 173 - 176]untitled [pp. 177 -
179]Back Matter [pp. 188 - 198]

Essay looking backwardWould you want to live in Edward Bellamy’.docx

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