Visual Rhetoric

Beginning with the basic theory of rhetoric drawn from Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca's New Rhetoric, we will extend it to writing which combines image, text, and sometimes sound (“imagetext”). Such writing has long been a staple of advertising, network news, and propaganda, but our focus will be on its use in making arguments and addressing issues in the public sphere. Guiding questions include:
--What are the strengths and limitations of such writing?
--Are the signifiers slipperier in multimodal writing?
--How can we teach it, respond to it, grade it?
--How to describe the arrangement of parts in multimodal writing? Is juxtaposition enough?
--What is the rhetoric of bullet points? Of PowerPoints™? Of sans-serif fonts?
In addition to readings from the texts listed above, seminar members should plan some time for serious on-line viewing and reviewing. Paper topics may discuss a point of theory or a pedagogical issue or issues about writing multimodally.

Texts:

• Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric. U. of Notre Dame Press, 1969. [0268004463]
• Carolyn Handa. Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World. Bedford-St. Martins, 2004. [0312409753]
• Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida. Trs. Richard Howard. Hill & Wang, 1981. [0374521344]
• Packet of duplicated articles.