Foresight at the Wright Brothers National Memorial: Technology, Memory, and the American Imagination
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Firgens, Benjamin Aaron
- Graduate Program:
- Communication Arts and Sciences (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 11, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Rosa Eberly, Major Field Member
Michele Kennerly, Major Field Member
Mary Stuckey, Major Field Member
Patrick Parsons, Outside Unit & Field Member
Stephen Browne, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Andrew High, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- Public Memory
Technology
Rhetoric
Social Imagination
Wright Brothers - Abstract:
- This dissertation studies the Wright Brothers National Monument and Memorial (WRBR) in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. As a history of rhetoric about technology, it shows how Americans have relied on memories of the Wrights to invent and contest visions of the future. As an exploration of the role of foresight in public memory, it also demonstrates that public memory in general relies upon expectations for future events as much as it does recollections of the past. The first chapter tells the biography of the WRBR. It shows how topoi of sublimity and frontier mythology justified the park’s development and significance, and it follows those topoi as they evolved into more ambivalent interpretations of the role of technology in modern American life. The second chapter analyzes the WRBR in the present. It demonstrates that the park offers a pedagogy of dreams: how to make the impossible real by mimicking the Wright brothers’ lives and inventive habits. The third chapter follows the Wrights’ influence on aviation’s visual cultures as well as those visual cultures’ influence on the WRBR. It illuminates the historical development of, and ethical consequences from, the habit of visualizing flight as something significant far away. The conclusion develops the project’s ethical implications. It describes a vision of foresight being moral when it opens itself to disappointment and takes upon itself the task of actively travelling to different worlds. It applies that vision to the possibilities and perils of the WRBR and speculates about foresight’s big picture implications for rhetoricians studying technology and memory.