Focus topic: Visual and Multimodal Rhetorics

One can discern four varieties of Visual Studies depending on purpose: tools for the critique of popular culture, especially the fabulations and manipulations of advertising on the one hand and media representations of social and political events on the other. These discourses (and their critiques) all have designs on us. general inquiry into visual semiotics: how images (in the broadest sense) mean, esp. compared to verbal language and in combination with it; designing to improve display of information for pattern recognition and analysis; critique of visuals as art—as pleasing and beautiful in themselves.
We will try to get some grounding in each of these, going more lightly over display of information--a burgeoning field. Multimodal rhetorics are now moving to include not just text and image but sound and movement as well, and there the leading question is how to describe integration and interaction of media within works.
Written work:
Some shorter analytic projects, entries in a 'response wiki,' and a final paper outlining a position on one of the main issues presented in the course.

Texts:
Carolyn Handa. Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World. Bedford-St. Martins. 2004. ISBN: 0312409753
David Machin, Introduction to Multimodal Analysis. Hodder Arnold. 2007. ISBN: 0374521344