Spacial Rhetorics 2

Dr. Will Kurlinkus

How is space composed through
memory? What have you learned
from our readings?
“Coal Keeps the Lights On” is an Analysis of a
Community of Memory: How is the Analysis Laid
Out? What are its movements (point, evidence,
analysis)? Key terms/engagements with other
scholars? Primary sources analyzed?
Key Terms of Space
and Place
• Space/place is a technology and a medium through which we
interact. It makes some rhetorics likely and others impossible
(think of the sacredness of a memorial). It shapes us and we are
shaped by it.

• space vs. place: In anthropology space is the physical locale vs.

place is the culture that happens there.

• First place (home), second place (work), third place (in-

between: coffee shops, barbershops, bowling alleys—civic places
of democracy)
• Third place: neutral ground, playful, class leveler, has
regulars

• Place is palimpsestic: there are always multiple places occurring

at once (your OU, is not professors, OU, is not undergrads OU—
they exist simultaneously)
How has
COVID-19
changed our
relationship to
space?
Where are you
from? How is
place
rhetorical &
memory laden
there?
Regional Rhetoric
• Critical regionalism: an attempt to chart the intricacies,
contradictions, and power plays that define a region,
“terminates not in the production of critique but in the
creation of new kinds of texts and images of place” (22)
1. Think of the region you are from/most familiar with.
2. Region: a relationship term between a set of sites.
”interplay among the various, competing definitions of
that region.” What are the competing definitions of a
region?
3. Counter Regions: stories told to resist more powerful
regional stereotypes. What are your regional counter
stories?
4. Q. What are the memories and stories (what I call
passkey memories) that define insiders and outsiders
(always a key set in spatial analysis). e.g. Mary the
Elephant.
• Insiders and outsiders often are fractally recursive.
5. Q. Who is drawing the map and why? Whose interests
are being served? “Region is always at some level an
attempt to persuade as much as it is to describe” (21).
 Who Controls Regional
Nostalgia & How?
• How do coal companies teach citizens how to be nostalgic?
• Friends of Coal & Corporate Ventriloquism: Coal
companies sponsor all sorts of events from football games
to barbeques but also make it look like everyone agrees
with coal (going so far as to make up fake citizens and
quotes on their website)
• Purposefully keeping other industries out: Coal
becomes “common sense” and everything else is hippy-
dippy
• Sacrifice Logic & Redemptive Memorials: “The roadside
memorial . . . stands as a solemn reminder of the human
cost that West Virginians have so dearly paid to power this
great nation”
• National Representations: Country singer Jimmy Rose
on America’s Got Talent singing “Coal Keeps the Lights
On”
• Coal as Heritage Brand: “a dimension of a brand’s
identity found in its track record, longevity, core values,
use of symbols and particularly in an organisational belief
that its history is important” that connects workers and
companies across multiple generations”
Spatial
Memory Tour
of Campus
What questions should be
asking of space and campus
memory?