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Because visuals play a significant communicative role in the majority of texts in the sciences, a theory of the role of verbal-visual interaction in the creation and communication of meaning would seem a useful addition to the exegetical armamentarium. This paper offers such a theory, Dual Coding Theory (DCT), borrowed from cognitive psychology but adapted to exegesis. An analysis of Lavoisier's final geological memoir, an analysis grounded in this theory, is designed to illustrate DCT's utility. In my conclusion, I take note of the fact that in a wide variety of contemporary media meaning is also largely the product of verbal-visual interaction.

The work of the German political philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, provides the framework for the analysis of the formation of national identities in the public sphere, and their erosion by means of systematically distorted communication. The object of this article is an exhibit that traveled throughout Germany, one designed to undermine a myth concerning Germany's “unmasterable” past, the legacy of its brutal conduct in World War Two. The history of the exhibit and its reception trace a path from courageous confrontation to prudent retreat in the face of systematically distorted communication. The article concludes by reflecting on the rhetorical significance of systematically distorted communication.

Chaim Perelman's concept of presence is extended and enriched by applying it to a historical museum exhibit that commemorated a watershed of Austrian history, the Anschluss of 1 938. To understand the argumentative effect of presence in this exhibit, new rhetorical categories are deployed: foreground and background, space, and time. These are managed in the interest of an ideological position: to free the Austrian conscience and consciousness from the burden of memory created by the disproportionate participation of Austrians in the Holocaust. Finally, a basic problem with presence is addressed: its apparent incompatibility with any form of rational argumentation. artifacts, documents, labels, visuals - seems to stretch the machinery of classical rhetoric beyond the breaking point. This can have nothing to do with the nature of these objects, all of which can find a proper place in forensic and deliberative speeches. It is rather the enthymematic structure of the classical oration that is responsible for this uneasiness of fit: it forms the armature that controls all other aspects of the speech. In the case of historical museum exhibits, in contrast, there is no apparent order of importance among the persuasive means employed; rather, it is the orchestration of these means that is the proper object of study. As in a symphony, the individual components are meaningful, not in themselves, but only insofar as they participate in a persuasive whole. The parallel with presence, as defined in The New Rhetoric is irresistible. For Ghaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, presence is a rhetorical effect, the ways speakers and writers focus the attention of their audiences on those aspects of their subject that are most likely to promote the case they want to make. Presence is a consequence of the need to select from a mass of material and a variety of persuasive means. When they make this selection with an eye to persuading particular audiences, speakers and writers - and, as we shall see, historical exhibit curators - are taking advantage of the psychological fact that "the thing on which the eye dwells, that which is best or most often seen is, by that very circumstance, overestimated." Initially, then, the effect

Alan gross on the discourses of science by Marcello Pera. Trans. Clarissa Botsford. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.