Files
Abstract
This dissertation provides a retheorization of the rhetoric of public memory through the Freudian concept of displacement in the specific context of Hurricane Katrina. In analyzing the history of New Orleanss fatalistic anxiety over its own destruction, the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina itself and failures of the Bush Administrations response, and the working-through of Katrinas memory during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, I argue that reading public memory in the absence of traditional practices of memorialization requires scholars to interpret memory-work. Analogous to Freudian dream-work, memory-work is a description of the collective psychic logic by which traditional objects of memory are produced and trauma is managed. Each chapter attends to a different form of displacement and the rhetorical means by which they are achieved. In so doing, I reimagine memory as the dialectical relationship of remembering and forgetting, which necessitates a different set of theories and methods capable of describing its rhetoricity.