ABSTRACT

This article offers the “architrope” as a means for apprehending rhetorical figures on a symbolic landscape (or “tropography”). I argue that ethical critique of public memory places requires more than reading visual representations and envisioning resistive viewer agencies. Inspired by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s declaration that it should not be possible to remember Victorian England’s women writers without recalling the “worlding” functions of colonial literature in British imperialism, I examine how the Brontë Parsonage Museum should unworld and otherworld its memoryscape. Adding spatial dimension to visual rhetoric, I map tropographic turns where visitors should not only unsettle histories but also confront aporias of postcolonial, feminist, and queer memories. Although rhetorical scholars celebrate the radical potential of the uncanny and the subjunctive mood, my analysis shows that uncanniness can be commodified, and colonizing narratives necessitate overt negation. Remapping commonplaces of museums and memorials therefore requires replacing rhetorical theory’s acquiescence to possibility with emplaced attunement to impossible demands of the forgotten and unrepresentable dead.

摘要

本文提供了“architrope”作为理解象征性景观（或“地形学”）上的修辞图形的一种手段。我认为，对公共记忆场所的道德批判需要的不仅仅是阅读视觉表现和设想抵抗性的观众机构。受加亚特里·查克拉沃蒂·斯皮瓦克（Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak）的启发，如果不回顾英帝国主义殖民文学的“世界化”功能，就不可能记住维多利亚时代的英国女作家，我研究了勃朗特牧师博物馆应如何将其记忆景观从世界中分离出来并进入另一个世界。在视觉修辞中添加空间维度，我绘制了地形图，游客不仅要扰乱历史，还要面对后殖民、女权主义和酷儿记忆的难题。尽管修辞学者赞扬怪异和虚拟语气的激进潜力，但我的分析表明，怪异可以被商品化，而殖民叙事需要公开否定。因此，重新映射博物馆和纪念馆的常见之处需要用对被遗忘和无法代表的死者的不可能的要求进行协调来取代修辞理论对可能性的默许。