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The contemporary portrayals of cityscapes on television create a 'postcard effect', a way of seeing that affords the viewer the pleasure of a tourist gaze. This disposition both reflects and legitimizes a fragmented experience of visiting a location without immersing oneself in the intricacies of its politics and geography.

This essay offers a reading of one of the largest public commemorative projects in recent U.S. history, the Celebrate the Century stamp program, in order to explore the ambivalent potential of collective memory in postmodernity. Celebrate the Century exhibits the tension between aesthetic and political heterogeneity, on the one hand, and the tendency toward commodification and political amnesia, on the other. The essay develops by considering the evolution of commemorative postal iconograpby and its relation to postmodern simulacra, the process of selection of stamp subjects for Celebrate the Century, and the array of display strategies that helped to frame the collection as a commodity, the public as tourists, and history as progress toward consumer democracy. Key words: collective memory, postmodernity, postal stamps, iconography, consumer democracy

The essay argues for a reconsideration of the role of the 'literate revolution' in the disciplining of rhetorical practice in the fourth century BCE. Specifically, the argument addresses the tension between oral memory and literate rationality in Isocrates and Aristotle to illustrate two divergent possibilities of appropriating oral linguistic resources of a culture. Aristotle's literate classification of endoxa (received opinions) and pisteis (proofs) depoliticizes the oral utterances and maxims of contemporary Greek culture, thereby rendering discourse a mere accessory of a political agent. By contrast, Isocrates conceives of rhetorical performance as constitutive of political agency and civic identity. Key words: Aristotle, endoxa, identity, Isocrates, literacy, orality. performance

Making Silence Speak: Women's Voices in Greek Literature and Society. Edited by Andre Lardinois and Laura McClure. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001; pp. xiii + 296. $55.00; paper $ 17.95. [...]

The recent cultural studies scholarship that admires the textual openness of the reality dating show Blind Date are challenged in a textual analysis. The limits of textual polysemy in the new generation of interactive or enhanced television formats are highlighted.

How a memorial impacts public memory depends not just on its symbolic appeals but also on how it gains the attention of visitors and how those appeals convert visitors into engaged participants. Although numerous studies have explored visitors' performances at sites of memory, this scholarship has largely overlooked what we call "the accidental tourist," the would-be visitor who had not planned to visit a site of memory but ended up doing so because of the site's proximity to another existing attraction or daily route. Building on research into the performances of memory at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, we expand inquiry into the way memorials attract and engage visitors by studying two temporary memorials to the cost of the Iraq War. We demonstrate how these memorials gain attention and prompt the engagement of "accidental tourists" through temporal and spatial tactics as well as both overt and subtle cues for visitors to interact with the site, organizers, and other visitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spring 2012 the Russian feminist art collective Pussy Riot became world famous when five of its members were arrested for their "Punk Prayer for Freedom" in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in central Moscow. Western media swiftly embraced the group and celebrated it as an icon of youthful female rebellion against Putin's authoritarian regime. Yet the Western reception largely obscured the "regional accent" of the group's protest rhetoric. This article seeks to restore this regional accent by foregrounding the rhetorical significance of place in Pussy Riot's acts of protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]