| Alumni professor of English at the University of Florida, James Twitchell thinks that closer and more serious attention should be paid to how advertising works, mainly because advertising defines our culture more than does literature. Advertisements in print, on TV, and in other forms may be cultural junk food, but they are a much more common diet than whatever might be regarded as cultural health food. In his new book, AdCult USA, Twitchell suggests that the style and rhetoric of advertising, the ways of understanding and naming experiences that are made common by commercial speech, are increasingly the only shared ways of communicating in our country. Because we are so at-home with the sophisticatedly winsome sales pitch, the appeal that entertainingly encourages and legitimizes our desires makes other forms of speech sound and feel more like commercials, from political campaigns to classroom presentations to sermons. |
AdcultUSA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (Columbia University Press, 1996) |
