-1-
Letters to America: Dialectical epistolarity in post-9/11 advertising
Abstract
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington,
advertisers sought to reassure their clients and colleagues that business would continue
and that the nation would recover. Many of the full-page advertisements in the New York
Times during the six weeks following the attacks were framed as letters. This study draws
upon the literatures of epistolary critique, visual meaning and metaphor, and rhetorical
criticism to explore the rhetorical device of framing ads as letters. We utilize the triadic
classification system of Charles Sanders Peirce to classify the letters-as-ads into either
iconic, indexical or symbolic frames. Our initial assumption that more graphically iconic
ads would rely less on textual metaphor, and vice versa, was confirmed. Finally, we
encourage the consideration of epistolary rhetoric as a critical tool of analysis.