| This dissertation analyzes advertising rhetoric from two historical periods to assess its impact and participation in other forms of public discourse. It focuses on print advertisements produced in the 1890's and 1990's to study changes in the methods of rhetorical persuasion employed by advertising. Within the last one hundred years, advertising appears to have echoed the larger epistemological and aesthetic trends operating in American culture in general. Roughly speaking, it has moved from the use of post-enlightenment rhetorical methods in the late nineteenth century to postmodern methods of persuasion in the late twentieth century.;Yet a closer reading of this ostensibly linear "progress" yields multiple contradictions and discontinuities: advertising has, for example, always contained elements of the postmodern. At the same time, it has never fully escaped its post-enlightenment past, as it still retains many such rhetorical elements today. Advertising rhetoric both adopts and subverts the various public discourses which surround it. In this work, such discourses range from themes of scientific rationalism and a nationalistic emphasis on hygienics in the nineteenth century, to the fragmented, anxiety-laden and chaotic forms of discourse which help to shape the era of postmodernity.;Finally, because advertising usually employs the kinds of non-print textual forms towards which our society is increasingly moving (such as visual, audio, electronic, or other forms which depart from the primarily static, print-based literacy which the academy has traditionally embraced), it recommends itself highly as a tool for teaching students the literacy skills which they will need in an environment of rapid technological change. The final chapter discusses how advertising's ideologically charged texts also can serve as excellent sites for teaching critical reading, thinking, and writing. |
