Interpreting "Rear Window Culture" From The Perspective Of Kenneth Burke’s Identification Theory

With the development of automobile culture, car stickers on private vehicles are getting more and more popular, almost a ubiquitous practice and a new trend known as "rear window culture." Car stickers have been approached from different perspectives. But studies on their symbolic power in light of new rhetoric are scan and scarce. Kenneth Burke, who ranks the foremost rhetorician in the twentieth century, advances Identification Theory with the following three aspects:identification by sympathy, identification by antithesis and identification by inaccuracy. It is in these three aspects that the present study sets out to analyze "rear window culture" with representative examples collected. For identification by sympathy, the rhetor utilizes car stickers to raise "sympathy" from the audience to ensure safe driving by stressing their similar experience as novices, concern for female and old drivers, the common sense of virtues and the humour of popular culture relieving the road-rage. For identification by antithesis, the rhetor utilizes car stickers to satirize the "common enemy" endangering social traffic safety in order to unite the audience to boycott the misdeed against traffic regulations and avoid hidden dangers. Some stickers claiming the rhetor’s nationalism in anti-Japanese protest due to Diaoyu Island dispute help transfer the target of public hostility from Japanese-brand cars to the "common enemy" of our nation. For identification by inaccuracy, the rhetor creates rhetorical vision through vocatives, pictures or other symbols to induce the audience unconsciously into the side of "we" or set them in the precarious position to remind them of keeping caution. The present study not only expounds the rhetoric motive, the rhetoric cogency and the process of identification implied in "rear window culture" but also enables us to observe the tendency of socio-cultural development. For a long time rhetorical study in China has been centred on rhetorical devices, so the present study is innovative in that the application of western theory of identification to the analysis of "rear window culture" will shed new light to the subject under investigation.