Abstract

That anyone should want to use critical reading in analysis of advertising should be surprising if one accepts a broad conception of letters as including anything in print that worth studying. My idea of English studies supports point of view that our concern in English departments ought to be with critical reading and writing of all kinds of texts, just imaginative literature. In other words, we ought to be concerned as much with rhetorical inquiries as with aesthetic inquiries. In its own right, advertising provides a kind of distinctive knowledge about society. To some critics, advertising fills a genuine need by creating markets for new and valuable products and by expanding and strengthening economy. Advertising also reveals how techniques of science can contribute to better living. In addition, it informs people about available goods and services and invites them to secure good things of life-material comforts, entertainment, travel, and so forth. To some critics, however, advertising creates false values. These critics contend that since some products are basically alike, all too often advertisers appeal to people's baser instincts and emotions to sell their products. To stimulate demand for a product, they attach psychological values such as acquisitiveness, power, sexual pleasure, attractiveness, social approval, and competitive success, none of which are in product. To attain these values, all consumer needs to do to buy appropriate product. In brief, advertising an exercise in a special kind of persuasion. As if these criticisms were enough, advertisers have been accused of manipulating people without their consent at some deeper level of consciousness, of selling to id, as one critic put it (Seldin 442-43). A number of critics have commented on use of techniques in advertising. Vance Packard calls them hidden persuaders(3). Marshall McLuhan refers to them as subliminal pills for subconscious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell (228). They are not meant for conscious consumption. Their mere existence, asserts McLuhan, is a testimony to somnambulistic state of a tired metropolis (229). There evidence to suggest that some of these criticisms are justified. As early as 1934, James Rorty, in his book Our Master's Voice:Advertising, noted that the advertising man is, in fact, a journeyman psychologist (241). He