Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-15-2019

Department

English

Abstract

When Kenneth Burke visited the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War” in the summer of 1942, he most likely did not expect to leave with such intense and intensely contradictory impressions. His visit there offers rhetoric scholars an opportunity to examine the exhibition – important for museum rhetoric because of its propagandistic political message and its innovative visual and material design. Considering the exhibition on its own terms, and the way designers managed problems of circulation and implemented new methods of “extended vision” helps us to present Burke’s then-developing theories (placement, the pentad) as themselves decidedly visual – photographic, even – and concomitantly, for that moment at least, as decidedly war-directed.

Comments

This is the accepted manuscript version of the article which is published in final form in the Quarterly Journal of Speech volume 105, issue 4, which can be accessed at DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2019.1657237

Original Publication Information

Hawhee, Debra & Megan Poole. "Kenneth Burke at the MoMA: A viewer’s theory." 2019 Quarterly Journal of Speech, 105(4): 418-440.

DOI

10.1080/00335630.2019.1657237

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