Rhetoric and/at/of the State/County Fair

Submitted by syntaxfactory on August 7, 2012 - 8:55am

The Minnesota State Fair, one of six annual events I live for (just slightly higher on the list than my wedding anniversary) starts in a few weeks.

Are there any rhetoricans who work on State/County fairs as sites of rhetoric, literacy, etc.?

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Submitted by Brett Ommen (not verified) on August 9, 2012 - 2:36pm.

To the extent we understand fairs largely as food events, Cara Finnegan offers up an account of the visual resources of regional food here: http://caraf.blogs.com/caraf/2008/10/second-ever-first-efforts-image-cha..., utilizing Vanessa Beasley's work on local address. And of course, Gunn's bit on county fair corn dogs turns what Finnegan describes as the safety of food on its head: http://www.joshiejuice.com/blog/?p=2527.

Of course the stretch from fairs to food leaves out all the ways fairs maintain a space for bucolic nostalgia (in the case of the Minnesota State Fair, this space is governed by Garrison Keillor, so you might find some proximate fair rhetoric in Larson and Oravec's 1987 CSMC piece).

Pete Simonson on the county fair

Submitted by Jim Aune on August 7, 2012 - 5:50pm.

The last chapter of Pete Simonson's book is on the county fair:

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/98dqh9ym9780252035173.html

Highly recommended.

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