oa The Edifying Structures of the Bijou Imaginary. An Investigation into Images, Rhetoric, Memory, and Politics

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This chapter analyses the Bijou collection of catechist lantern slides, catechists’ notebooks, and editors’ booklets from the interrelated perspectives of image rhetoric and memory politics. The contribution aims to contextualize the rhetorical power held by the Bijou slide projections in relation to the mnemonic strategies used by established Catholic publishing houses and educators in the early twentieth century. Taking two Bijou stories as case studies, the authors investigate the rhetorical devices at work in both individual images and their sequences, pointing out the underlying structures of the edifying world of the Bijou projections. They demonstrate how and to what effect Bijou stories that drew inspiration from various sources, like national, social, and biblical history, were constructed to bring the hypothetical audience up in the Catholic faith. This analysis considers the context of Catholic memory politics and the idea of ‘education through the senses’, as well as other graphic and pictorial traditions at work in the intericonicity of the given time period.