"The most important book to be published on cultural studies and rhetoric in the last decade. For students and others interested in the relationship between cultural practice, ideology critique, and the politics of representation, this is an indispensable book. It is also a book that takes seriously the relationship between strategies of understanding and strategies of critical engagement and transformation. A 'must read.'"

--Henry A. Giroux, Pennsylvania State University

"At The Intersection catches cultural studies in a useful phase of uncertainty about its guiding aims and ideas and rhetorical inquiry in a newly ambitious mood about its contemporary applications. The result puts some welcome fizz into cultural theory and illustrates what possibilities remain for cultural analysis."

--John Corner, University of Liverpool, UK

"'Culture,' Raymond Williams astutely remarked a number of years ago, is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. Rhetoric, we have since come to recognize, is another. This timely volume takes up the pressing task of teasing out and analyzing the entailments of their fraught relation. From the Culture Wars to the Memo Wars, contemporary film to genetic medicine, sixteenth-century painting to contemporary political discourse, intellectual traditions to public memorials and theme parks, these critical essays are certain to move an already vital debate in new and productive directions."

--Barbara Biesecker, University of Iowa

Guilford Press Web Site, June, 2000

What is the relationship between cultural and rhetorical studies? What can scholars in the two fields learn from each other? This insightful volume is based on the premise that these fields address specific and parallel questions about culture, critical practice, and
interpretation, and that opening up a dialogue between them can enhance both and provide a more complete understanding of society. Noted contributors across a variety of disciplines examine the overlaps and contradictions between these approaches, how they can contribute to each other, and the problems and questions that surface with this linkage. Exploring both critical and pedagogical practice, chapters address such questions as the relationship between images, representation, and ideology; influence and the struggle for power; how to blend theory and case study analysis effectively; and the goals of academic work.

Scholars and students, from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, who are interested in issues of criticism and contemporary culture.

Serves as a text in graduate-level courses in rhetorical studies, cultural studies, American studies, literary studies, and critical theory.

Preface
Introduction: Approaching the Intersection: Issues of Identity, Politics, and Critical Practice, Rosteck

I. Reading the Popular and the Political: Converging Trajectories of Textuality, Method, Context

1. Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial, Blair and Michel
2. Catching the Third Wave: The Dialectic of Rhetoric and Technology, Aune
3. Reading the Culture Wars: Traveling Rhetoric and the Reception of Curricular Reform, Mailloux
4. Subject Positions as a Site of Rhetorical Struggle: Representing African Americans, Brummett and Bowers
5. American Cultural Criticism in the Pragmatic Attitude, E. W. Mechling and J. Mechling
6. The Character of "History" in Rhetoric and Cultural Studies: Recoding Genetics, Condit
7. The Ambassadors' Body: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Gaze, Krips

II. Envisioning Alternatives: Beyond the Intersection

8. The Linguisticality of Cultural Studies: Rhetoric, Close Reading, and Contextualization, Nelson
9. A Cultural Tradition in Rhetorical Studies, Rosteck
10. Cultural Struggle: A Politics of Meaning in Rhetorical Studies, Sloop and Olson
11. The Triumph of Social Science: The Silent Language as Master Text in American Cultural Studies, Gronbeck
12. Antitheory and Its Antithesis: Rhetoric and Ideology, Brantlinger
13. Courting Community in Contemporary Culture, Frentz and Rushing