Rhetorical Landscapes in America

"This is a book that should be read by everyone who cares about how we obtain our ideas and how we are led to identify with this or that community. Following Kenneth Burke's brilliantly expanded definition of rhetoric as including all forms of 'identification,' Gregory Clark now demonstrates the ways in which the minds of even the most 'thoughtless' tourists are reshaped by what they see. The rhetoric of landscapes has hardly ever been mentioned before, and Clark's demonstration of how it works may well change all careful readers' (and tourists') notions of how their minds have been shaped."—Wayne Booth, author of The Rhetoric of Fiction and coauthor of The Craft of Research

"Rhetorical Landscapes in America is an extraordinary book. Imaginatively expanding on Kenneth Burke's rhetoric of identification, Gregory Clark skillfully guides us through a rich exploration of the discursive and nondiscursive experiences of civic tourism. In so doing, he persuasively demonstrates how those experiences of symbolic landscape significantly shape our individual and collective identities as Americans. At this moment in our national history, this book is a tour not to be missed."—Steven Mailloux, University of California, Irvine, Chancellor's Professor of Rhetoric and author of Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics