Browsing by Subject "History of media"

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    If stones could argue : the rhetoric of Covenanter memory, media and monuments
    (2016-05-06) Steel, Connie Michelle; Longaker, Mark Garrett, 1974-; Roberts-Miller, Patricia; Barchas, Janine; Boyle, Casey; Hoad, Neville W
    Through the cold, stony context of their relationship to human remains, cemetery monuments blur the disciplinary borders between English, linguistics, archaeology, history, architecture, art history and religious studies through the mixing of language and visual arts into integrated attention-focusing texts. From the Reformation into the Victorian era, intergenerational changes to Scottish Covenanter monumentality reveal the dynamic nature of Presbyterian evangelical rhetoric and Scottish media usage. This project engages with rhetorical genre studies to demonstrate how Scottish epitaphic genres question the cohesiveness of British identity and the assumptions of English departments about what constitutes text, genre, and media. The dissertation makes links between conversations in historiography, memory studies and rhetorics of public display through three case studies of kairos, style and exigency: Robert Wodrow’s History of the Sufferings (1721), The Margaret Wilson Monument (1859) and the Valley Cemetery, Stirling, Scotland. Approaching argumentation as a techne of focusing attention, the project expands existing conversations about plain style, and the later “bourgeois” styles by posing memorability as a special component of monumental style. Wodrow’s foundational history of the ‘Killing Times’ illustrates the role of martyrologies as monuments and reveals their common exigencies with cemeteries. Turning to landmark monuments in the Valley Cemetery in Stirling, the project shows how Wodrow’s martyr histories were re-recorded in stone. The Margaret Wilson Monument’s form, content and gender highlight the challenges of extremes of kairos, mobile readership and ambiguous authorship in outdoor rhetorics of display. The project then looks past the epitaphs to the cemetery through the lens of Foucault’s heterotopia. The Stirling Valley Cemetery demonstrates the way heterotopia work as media of in this case making an evangelical commentary on the changing status of the Sabbath in the Victorian period. The project ends with an epilogue looking at challenges of digitizing landmark monuments and the potential of online social databases for displaying cultural memory in a short case study of Robert Wodrow’s grave page in FindaScottishgrave.com.