Rhetoric of collective memory – approaches, perspectives and research problems

Abstract

The article is an attempt to define the term “rhetoric of memory”. The first part presents a linguistic approach to collective memory defined as an image of the past created in the text and remembering as a communicative practice. Attention was also paid to the role of the individual in the process of remembering. The following sections present key concepts of the rhetoric of memory and the assumptions of visual and multimodal rhetoric. The last part is a rhetorical analysis of the speech delivered by Marian Turski on the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The analyzed text – intertextual and intericonic – contains and evokes images of the past, and at the same time serves to remember – it shows the past as a continuum, a process. The analysis – in accordance with the assumptions of multimodal rhetoric – consists of three parts: syntactic analysis (semiotic means), semantic analysis (meaning), pragmatic analysis (sign functions).