Rhetoric, Inc. Ford’s Filmmaking and the Rise of Corporatism
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Timothy Johnson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville.
<p>“This book does important work by advancing a theory of how society may be organized around terms, values, images, and ways of thinking promulgated by corporations. It makes a valuable contribution to communication and rhetorical theory, to film studies, and even to economics.”</p><p>—Barry Brummett, author of <i>Rhetoric of Machine Aesthetics</i></p>
<p>“This book brings together a set of literatures that, taken together in service of the case study at hand, offer a fascinating perspective on the relationship between rhetoric, film, corporatization, and hegemony. The central concept—incorporational rhetoric—will undoubtedly be useful to a wide range of scholars studying consumerism and commercial discourse, and rhetoric writ large.”</p><p>—Christine Harold, author of <i>OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture</i></p>
In 1914, the Ford Motor Company opened its Motion Picture Laboratory, an in-house operation that produced motion pictures to educate its workforce and promote its products. Just six years later, Ford films had found their way into schools and newsreels, travelogues, and even feature films in theaters across the country. It is estimated that by 1961, the company’s movies had captured an audience of sixty-four million people.
This study of Ford’s corporate film program traces its growth and rise in prominence in corporate America. Drawing on nearly three hundred hours of material produced between 1914 and 1954, Timothy Johnson chronicles the history of Ford’s filmmaking campaign and analyzes selected films, visual and narrative techniques, and genres. He shows how what began as a narrow educational initiative grew into a global marketing strategy that presented a vision not just of Ford or corporate culture but of American life more broadly. In these films, Johnson uncovers a powerful rhetoric that Ford used to influence American labor, corporate style, production practices, road building, suburbanization, and consumer culture. The company’s early and continued success led other corporations to adopt similar programs.
Persuasive and thoroughly researched, Rhetoric, Inc. documents the role that imagery and messaging played in the formation of the modern American corporation and provides a glimpse into the cultural turn to the economy as a source of entertainment, value, and meaning.
The RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric (STR) publishes books that move between rhetoric and other emerging or established disciplines, taking seriously both what makes them strange to one another and how they can be brought together to build space for new conversations, shed light on overlooked areas of inquiry, or even create new ways of doing scholarship. Books in the series speak not only to the disciplines in which rhetoric finds a comfortable home but also to disciplines that are less familiar with it, recognizing that rhetoric will itself be changed—methodologically, conceptually, substantively—in any such transdisciplinary relationship. We’re looking for projects whose case studies stem from disciplines beyond rhetoric, projects that stake out new theoretical ground, and/or projects that grapple with the unfamiliar, odd, or uncommon. Such transdisciplinary exchanges include, but are not limited to, rhetoric and: science, technology, or mathematics; the law or legal studies; digital or visual culture; health and medicine; disability studies; Indigenous studies; economics; environmental studies; gender studies; and religion. We also welcome work that foregrounds transnational perspectives, decolonial approaches, and/or queer of color critique.
Books in the series are well written and accessible to a broad range of students and scholars in rhetoric and other fields. They should be innovative and rigorously argued, combining theoretical sophistication with smart case analysis.
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Timothy Johnson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville.