Containment Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Imagining Amana, Inscribing America

Michelle Smith

doi:10.1080/02773940903413423

Rhetoric Society Quarterly Mar 2010

Containment Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Imagining Amana, Inscribing America

Michelle Smith Pennsylvania State University

Abstract

Nineteenth-century presses delighted in reporting on the “spectacle” of the Amana Society, playing up the contrast between this pious communistic community of German immigrants and its “ambitious” individualistic American counterparts. These accounts employed a rhetoric of containment, a form of rhetorical imagining that contains the threat of a non-normative community. Three characteristics of this rhetoric are evident in the Amana descriptions: (1) a particular gaze that views the community as a picture; (2) a degree of praise that is simultaneously undermined by a nostalgic attitude toward the community; and (3) an assertion that the benefits of this lifestyle require an unthinkable sacrifice incompatible with the imagining audience's nature or values. Containment rhetoric neutralizes the threat of the imagined group—often by circulating its tropes and images to more public, powerful venues—and implicitly defines the group as peripheral to the larger public.

Journal: Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published: 2010-03-26
DOI: 10.1080/02773940903413423
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Open Access: Closed
Topics: rhetorical criticism public rhetoric
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Cited by in this index (1)

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Containment Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Imagining Amana, Inscribing America

Abstract

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

References (19)

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