Using his book “Rhetorics of Display", editor Lawrence J. Prelli discusses how twenty-first century citizens continually confront displays of information and images, from the verbal images of speeches and literature to visual images of film and photography to exhibits in museums to the arrangement of our homes to the merchandising of consumer goods. Illuminating ways in which phenomena, persons, places, events, identities, communities, and cultures are exhibited before audiences, Professor Prelli explains the processes of selecting what to reveal and what to conceal that together constitute the rhetorics of display. Seventeen case studies in his book canvass a representative and diverse range of displays—from body piercing to a civil rights memorial to a Titanic exhibition to imagery found in gambling casinos shedding light on rhetorics that are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture.
