| Abstrakt: |
On December 14, 2012, after killing his mother, twenty-year old Adam Lanza drove to Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut and took the lives twenty first-graders and six school teachers and staff members. A few months following the shooting, a committee gathered in Newtown to pass a vote that would demolish the school building to construct a new one. The new Sandy Hook Elementary School was publicly unveiled to journalists on July 29, 2016 which created a pictorial event that allowed the larger public to witness the new building through the medium of online photographs. Through a critical rhetorical reading of the new Sandy Hook Elementary School through online pictures, I argue that the building is a non-memorial that symbolically functions as memorials through online pictures. The analysis illustrates that four of these photographs of the new Sandy Hook Elementary School operate in relation to a moral vernacular public memory by reclaiming the utilization of space, reconceptualizing the place of memorializing, and permitting rhetorics of affect to remind the public to keep their government officials accountable for their safety. To conclude, the analysis denotes the nuances and new avenues for memorializing through online photographs specific to vernaculars in relation to gun legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
