Rhetorical imaginings and multimodal arguments at the European Green Belt

Abstract

We analyze the visual, verbal, and material arguments present at the European Green Belt (EGB), a contemporary conservation project built from the former Iron Curtain. The EGB presents itself as a “living memorial” that fuses together former warring countries and thus makes an argument for the unity of Europe. To analyze this incredibly diverse and rhetorically significant project, we put the digital representations of the site and the discourse around the EGB into conversation with situated, rhetorical criticism performed along the EGB site itself. We analyze the EGB’s different argumentative juxtapositions regarding history and memory, nonhuman nature and technology, peace and war, memorial and tourism, and preservation and restoration. Overall, we find that the transformation of the Iron Curtain from divisive border into a European-wide, transboundary biodiversity conservation project uses transcendence as a key argumentative structure, which has implications for how we understand the human relationship with the environment, history, and memory

Repurposing the Ruin to Remember: Multimodal Rhetoric and Cultural Memory in the Post–Soviet Memorial Museum

“…I contend that this juxtaposition through authenticity is a critical part of the argumentative and rhetorical labor for the repurposed ruin-turned-memorial museum. Extending Bloomfield and Sangalang’s (2014) notion of visual juxtaposition that was then expanded to material objects by Allison and Bloomfield (2018, 2019), I continue this development by reading these Schrödinger memory places as juxtaposing material and immaterial authentic artifacts simultaneously. Rather than using linguistic propositions to explain the horrors and the lessons of history, the repurposing of historical authenticated artifacts turns ruins into self-referential illustrations of history.…”

“…Taking Gilbert’s and Groarke’s multimodal approaches to rhetoric and argumentation, we can begin to see how the repurposed memorial museum communicates cultural memory discourses in the creation of a unified polity on behalf of the state. Here, the memorial museum is a Janus-faced (Allison & Bloomfield, 2018, 2019) memory place. It is both a container and an object of memory made from multiple rhetorical artifacts via differing modes.…”

“…This is critically then paired with authenticity as a rhetorical device. I therefore contend that Through such inferential work, the tourist’s own subjective motivations and experiences become just as important as the physical site itself in creating a “rhetorical imaginary” (Allison & Bloomfield, 2018, 2019) of what-it-was to what-is-now.…”