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This paper examines what can be learnt from "new rhetoric" (focusing on the work of the American rhetorician Kenneth Burke [1897-1993]) about (national) identity and discusses how nationalism can be taught from such a rhetorical perspective. Despite the "deconstruction" of nation(alism) as a grand narrative, there is a new tendency towards emphasizing national identity, caused by trends such as globalization and multiculturalism. In the language and literature teaching curriculum, this paradoxical situation often causes frictions for teachers who very often are expected to teach standard language and national literature. The hypothesis is that rhetoric is a tool to deal with these tensions in the curriculum. This paper focuses on Flanders as a case-study. Together with pre-service teachers it analysed the rhetorical construction of Flanders from a "dramatistic" perspective. It is argued that Burke's concepts are useful tools to make students "symbol-wise": to understand the way national symbols work, and to develop critical engagement with, as well as on behalf of, those symbols. (Contains 9 notes.)

In this article it is assumed that the documentary impulse that gave the impetus toCourage, a photobook on people in poverty published in Belgium in 1998, is related to how theGeneral Report on Poverty, published in 1994, accused the child welfare sector and protection services of having far too authoritative and coercive an approach. This article analysesCouragein relation to the issue of out-of-home placement of children in poverty following the framework proposed by Cara A. Finnegan in order to explore a rhetorical history of visual images. In this deductive approach the article pays attention to important moments in the life of photographs: production, reproduction, and circulation. This is combined with an inductive approach to generate a rhetorical understanding of the distinct generic characteristics of the visual artefact, in which attention is paid to the substantive as well as the stylistic characteristics of the images. The article attempts to analyse and explain systematically how symbolic acts and artefacts construe rhetorical processes on poverty, and explore how images of children and parents in poverty situations in the “rhetorical artefact”Couragecan become “objects to think with”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In their article "A Case Study in Discourse Analysis of 'Community Arts' in Cultural Policy and the Press" An De bisschop, Kris Rutten, and Ronald Soetaert explore theoretical and applied aspects of the phenomenon of community arts. Community arts in Flanders have developed into a professional practice during the past few years and have received increased recognition from policy makers, scholars, and critics. This attention has caused a growing need to define the nature of a practice diverse in form, goal, and process. De bisschop, Rutten, and Soetaert discuss the problematics of community arts projects in comparative discourse analysis in order to interpret "situated" meanings in the practice of community arts, thereby shifting the question from "what is community arts?" to "how is meaning constructed about the notion and practice of community arts?" In doing so, they compare two geographical contexts (Flanders, Belgium and the Western Cape, South Africa) and two institutional contexts (cultural policy and the press). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]