International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

For several decades now the role of public memory in shaping the present has occupied the attention of scholars across the humanities. From Holocaust studies to architecture, literature and →  visual culture , colonialism, and queer theory, students of the subject are seeking to explain how and to what ends we avail ourselves of the past. Among the most recent and instructive contributions to this enterprise are those issuing from the study of rhetoric, which attends in particular to the discursive and strategic dimensions of public memory (→  Rhetorical Studies ). Historians of the art will note that the relationship between rhetoric and →  Memory is scarcely novel; indeed, it may be traced to antiquity, when early theorists counted memory as one of the five canons of rhetoric (the others being invention, arrangement, style, and delivery). It may be seen as closely related to Aristotle's system of topical recall, for example, and Cicero held it to be crucial in the education of the orator (→  Rhetoric, Greek ; Rhetoric, Roman ). Significant modifications of this relationship in the present age, however, warrant a new set of considerations (→  Rhetorics: New Rhetorics ). The following offers a brief definition of the subject and three suggestions for framing it as a rhetorical phenomenon. Public memory may be defined as a cultural process in which a shared sense of the past is ... log in or subscribe to read full text