Description
Book SynopsisExamines the role of museums in promoting cultural heritage and national identity, focusing on rhetorical understandings of public space and civic engagement.
Trade Review“M. Elizabeth Weiser crosses more national and disciplinary borders than any previous scholar in the search for unifying analyses of the identity work of museums. She investigates a wide array of material and a multidimensional set of productive dilemmas. The result is a complex, innovative, and yet clear and elegantly presented analysis of the work done by and through museums in placing their orchestrated and authorized rhetoric in dialogue with the experiences of visiting citizens.”
—Peter Aronsson,coeditor of National Museums and Nation-Building in Europe, 1750-2010: Mobilization and Legitimacy, Continuity and Change
“A definitive study of the ways in which museums are powerful rhetorical forces that engage people in the process of forming and revising their conceptions of national identity. For museum studies scholars, this book explains systematically the rhetoricality of the kind of experiences that museums provide. For those in rhetorical studies, it advances developing theories of experiential rhetorics, and I expect Museum Rhetoric to mark an important point of consolidation of recent rhetorical theories of nondiscursive communication.”
—Greg Clark,author of Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along
“Museum Rhetoric takes the reader on a captivating tour of national historical museums around the world to show how museums furnish complex narratives of national identity and create experiential spaces for visitors’ engagement with these narratives. Extending Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification and drawing on the transdisciplinary conversation about museums and public memory, the author enriches our understanding of the rhetorical mechanism of national identity formation and highlights the value of museums as sites of national identification.”
—Ekaterina Haskins,author of Popular Memories: Commemoration, Participatory Culture, and Democratic Citizenship
“An impressive, globally aware, and deeply researched example of rhetoricians’ powerful purchase on the effectivities of museums.”
—Greg Dickinson The Quarterly Journal of Speech
“By combining rhetorical and museum studies in a way that draws upon many of the key features of each, Weiser has offered us a fresh and stimulating perspective on the cultural work that museums perform. In this way, she broadens the fıeld of inquiry well beyond the boundaries of existing scholarship.”
—Patricia G. Davis Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Rhetorical Museum
2 The Story We Tell Ourselves
3 The Object of the Story
4 Identifying with the Museum
5 Identifying with the Nation
6 Alternative Identifications
Conclusion: The Museum in the World
Appendix: Museums Examined for This Study
Notes
References
Index
