Visual Rhetoric

Visual images, artifacts, and performances play a powerful part in shaping U.S. culture. To understand the dynamics of public persuasion, students must understand this "visual rhetoric." This rich anthology contains 20 exemplary studies of visual rhetoric, exploring an array of visual communication forms, from photographs, prints, television documentary, and film to stamps, advertisements, and tattoos. In material original to this volume, editors Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope present a critical perspective that links visuality and rhetoric, locates the study of visual rhetoric within the disciplinary framework of communication, and explores the role of the visual in the cultural space of the United States. Enhanced with these critical editorial perspectives, Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture provides a conceptual framework for students to understand and reflect on the role of visual communication in the cultural and public sphere of the United States. Key Features and Benefits Five broad pairs of rhetorical action—performing and seeing; remembering and memorializing; confronting and resisting; commodifying and consuming; governing and authorizing—introduce students to the ways visual images and artifacts become powerful tools of persuasion Each section opens with substantive editorial commentary to provide readers with a clear conceptual framework for understanding the rhetorical action in question, and closes with discussion questions to encourage reflection among the essays The collection includes a range of media, cultures, and time periods; covers a wide range of scholarly approaches and methods of handling primary materials; and attends to issues of gender, race, sexuality and class Contributors include: Thomas Benson; Barbara Biesecker; Carole Blair; Dan Brouwer; Dana Cloud; Kevin Michael DeLuca; Anne Teresa Demo; Janis L. Edwards; Keith V. Erickson; Cara A. Finnegan; Bruce Gronbeck; Robert Hariman; Christine Harold; Ekaterina Haskins; Diane S. Hope; Judith Lancioni; Margaret R. LaWare; John Louis Lucaites; Neil Michel; Charles E. Morris III; Lester C. Olson; Shawn J. Parry-Giles; Ronald Shields; John M. Sloop; Nathan Stormer; Reginald Twigg and Carol K. Winkler "This book significantly advances theory and method in the study of visual rhetoric through its comprehensive approach and wise separations of key conceptual components." —Julianne H. Newton, University of Oregon

Images play an important role in developing consciousness and the relationship of the self to its surroundings. In this distinctive collection, editors Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers examine the connection between visual images and persuasion, or how images act rhetorically upon viewers. Chapters included here highlight the differences and commonalities among a variety of projects identified as "visual rhetoric," leading to a more precise definition of the term and its role in rhetorical studies. Contributions to this volume consider a wide variety of sites of image production--from architecture to paintings, from film to needlepoint--in order to understand how images and texts work upon readers as symbolic forms of representation. Each chapter discusses, analyzes, and explains the visual aspect of a particular subject, and illustrates the ways in which messages and meaning are communicated visually. The contributions include work from rhetoric scholars in the English and communication disciplines, and represent a variety of methodologies--theoretical, textual analysis, psychological research, and cultural studies, among others. The editors seek to demonstrate that every new turn in the study of rhetorical practices reveals more possibilities for discussion, and that the recent "turn to the visual" has revealed an inexhaustible supply of new questions, problems, and objects for investigation. As a whole, the chapters presented here demonstrate the wide range of scholarship that is possible when a field begins to take seriously the analysis of images as important cultural and rhetorical forces. Defining Visual Rhetorics is appropriate for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in rhetoric, English, mass communication, cultural studies, technical communication, and visual studies. It will also serve as an insightful resource for researchers, scholars, and educators interested in rhetoric, cultural studies, and communication studies.

Intricate, expressive, given to grandeur and even excess, Baroque art as a style is inseparable from the meanings it seeks to convey. Vernon Hyde Minor’s Baroque Visual Rhetoric probes this combination of style and message and – equally importantly – the methodological basis on which the critical art historian comes to establish that meaning. Drawing on a breathtaking range of critical literature, from the German founders of art history as an academic discipline to Heidegger, Derrida, and de Man, Minor considers the issue through a series of Baroque masterpieces: Bernini’s Baldacchino in St. Peter’s Basilica, the statues in the church of San Giovanni in Laterano, Borromini’s church of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, Baciccio’s frescoes in the church of Il Gesù, the paintings of Philippe de Champaigne, and the Corsini Chapel in San Giovanni in Laterano.

Parks, maps, and mapping technologies like the GPS are objects of visual and material culture that rely on the interplay of text, context, image, and space to guide our interpretations of the world around us. LOCATING VISUAL-MATERIAL RHETORICS: THE MAP, THE MILL, AND THE GPS examines in depth, and in several contemporary settings, how visual and material discursive artifacts, when understood as rhetorical, shape our understanding of the unique cultural moments that these artifacts set out to represent.

The essays in VISUAL RHETORIC AND THE ELOQUENCE OF DESIGN foreground the rhetorical functions of design artifacts. Rhetoric, normally understood as verbal or visual messages that have a tactical persuasive objective—a speech that wants to convince us to vote for someone, or an ad that tries to persuade us to buy a particular product—becomes in Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design the persuasive use of a broad set of meta-beliefs. Designed objects are particularly effective at this second level of persuasion because they offer audiences communicative data that reflect, and also orchestrate, a potentially broad array of cultural concerns. Persuasion entails both the aesthetic form and material composition of any object.

Winner of the 2016 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award and the 2016 CCCC Research Impact Award In Still Life with Rhetoric, Laurie Gries forges connections among new materialism, actor network theory, and rhetoric to explore how images become rhetorically active in a digitally networked, global environment. Rather than study how an already-materialized “visual text” functions within a specific context, Gries investigates how images often circulate and transform across media, genre, and location at viral rates. A four-part case study of Shepard Fairey’s now iconic Obama Hope image elucidates how images reassemble collective life as they actualize in different versions, enter into various relations, and spark a firework of activity across the globe. While intent on tracking the rhetorical life of a single, multiple image, Still Life with Rhetoric is most concerned with studying rhetoric in motion. To account for an image’s widespread circulation and emergent activities, Gries introduces iconographic tracking—a digital research method for tracing an image’s divergent rhetorical becomings. Yet Gries also articulates a dynamic set of theoretical principles for studying rhetoric as a distributed, generative, and unforeseeable event that is applicable beyond the study of visual rhetoric. With an eye toward futurity—the strands of time beyond a thing’s initial moment of production and delivery—Still Life with Rhetoric intends to be taken up by those interested in visual rhetoric, research methods, and theory.

Baroque Visual Rhetoric probes the Baroque s combination of style and message and the methodological basis on which the critical art historian comes to establish that meaning."

Early modern printed books are copiously illustrated with charts, diagrams, and other kinds of images that represent systems of thought and ways of doing things. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature shows how these images fostered what Elizabeth Eisenstein called brainwork related to concepts of space, truth, art, and nature, and reveals their importance to poetry by Andrew Marvell and John Milton, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. The genres of illustration considered in this book include military strategy and tactics, garden design, instrumentation, Bibles, scientific schema, drawing instruction, natural history, comparative anatomy, and Aesop’s Fables. The argument produces unique insights into the ways in which visual rhetoric affected verbal expression, and the book develops novel methods of using printed images as evidence in the interpretation of the rich, strange, and beautiful literature of early modern England.