Wanted: A speech salesman for the United States government |
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| Authors: | Mrs Hugh Butler |
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| Institution: | Junior College of the Georgetown Visitation Convent |
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| Abstract: | This essay argues that the alleged demise of a unified and coherent public in contemporary twentieth‐century American political discourse is more a symptom of how we have visually objectified “the people” than it is a newly discovered fragmentation of the “thing” itself. This claim is developed by examining the emergence of social documentary photojournalism in the 1930s and its ideological implications for American liberal‐democratic rhetorical practices. James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is treated as a representative anecdote that illustrates the problems and possibilities of the tensions between individualism and collectivism that rest at the heart of liberal democracy. |
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| Keywords: | public “the people ” visual rhetoric photojournalism liberal democracy |
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