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ОглавлениеFields of Vision: A Background Study of References for Teachers
Anne R. Richards and Carol David
Writing teachers hoping to awaken in students a broad understanding of the cultural influences on individuals or of the rhetorical elements influencing the interpretation of discourse do well to acknowledge the importance of the visual: how we live, think, act, and read are all influenced profoundly by images appearing in print and digital media. The authors of the twelve essays published in this collection advocate an enlivened writing pedagogy reflecting the importance of complementary ways of knowing to our students. Teachers will find, in the chapters that follow, useful methods of importing the visual, frameworks informing these methods, and suggested assignments. This introduction summarizes a variety of ways of approaching the visual in the writing classroom, as well as sources that teachers may wish to consult.
“From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing,” Diana George’s history of the visual in composition teaching, recognizes the secondary position the visual has taken in our classrooms for the brief time it has been of interest to us: during this period, a sensitivity to the visual has only slowly and tenuously emerged. She observes, however, that new media are revolutionizing composition teaching because “for students who have grown up in a technology-saturated and an image-rich culture, questions of communication and composition absolutely will include the visual, not as attendant to the verbal but as complex communication intricately related to the world around them” (32). James E. Porter, in his account of the ethics of internetworked writing, states flatly that “[w]riting in the 21st century will be electronic” (103). From what we have experienced over the last decade in our ever more complexly networked classrooms, we must agree with him.
Notwithstanding, digital and print media are different and require distinct pedagogical approaches. Recalling Aristotle’s concepts of “coherence and perfection of artistic form,” which until recently have depended on the existence of a “beginning, middle, and end [. . .] based on fixed texts” (125), Richard A. Lanham observes that these architectonic concepts are being dismantled even as we write. The changes are often bewildering because, as Marshall McLuhan astutely observes, new media change what it means for their users to be human. When “a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world,” he writes, “[T]hen new ratios among all our senses occur” (41).
Communicators in the age of hypertext are undergoing, in Lanham’s words, a “readjustment of the alphabet/image ration.” And one of the most transformative potentials of digital technology, according to Lanham, is to “dissolve before our eye [. . .] the disciplinary boundaries that currently govern academic study of the arts” (13). Indeed, “the same volatility” that is shaking rhetoric’s edifice “dissolves the boundaries between the arts”: the shock we may experience upon encountering new computer technologies suggests the profundity of the change only beginning to occur in the “digital metamorphoses of the arts and letters” (13). Teachers of composition and communication who do not intend to obstruct the transformation that Lanham describes should, ideally, be as skilled in the use of hypertext as the average 18-year-old entering our classrooms. At the very least, we must acquire to the best of our abilities the skills needed to interpret and to create images and sounds and to integrate them electronically with discourse.
Understandably, however, writing teachers may be reluctant to revise pedagogies to reflect a focus on composing in digital environments. We may fear, for instance, that time dedicated to the visual will be time taken from writing—that we may be guilty of “dumbing down” the curriculum if we do not focus exclusively on discourse. That we have been trained to discuss words rather than pictures contributes to our reluctance to introduce images into the curriculum. In Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, W. J. T. Mitchell describes a “fear” that English studies historically has had of images—namely, that their presence will diminish the laboriously constructed superiority of the word as signifier. Yet reading time need not be affected by our including visual texts among the verbal texts we assign students, and writing time need not be affected at all. Our composition students typically are exposed to a wide variety of genres and rhetorical situations, and many of our most widely used writing textbooks, mirroring the texts students encounter in their daily lives, already incorporate images. Our students read, discuss, and write about not only belletristic essays but also visually enhanced advertising, journalism, Internet writing, and, in WAC classrooms, forms of quite specialized communication. Advanced writing classes often focus on such technically complex forms, which conventionally incorporate the visual. Viewed in light of institutional situations, consideration of visual texts in the writing classroom may seem an unremarkable development.
Students are much more likely than we are to be immersed in visual culture and to feel comfortable talking and writing about what they see. As each of the teachers we worked with in creating this anthology has discovered, bringing the visual forward can intensify student engagement with assignments. Teachers of English who make the visual a salient theme may find that students who recognize how an image can persuade may be better able to articulate what constitutes written persuasion or even argument; these students likely will grasp, at the very least, that the distance between visual and written cultures is less vast than they had imagined. Some eventually may intuit that an argument can be conceptualized as an image composed in the mind of the writing subject; for, as Mitchell notes in regard to the discourse-focused epistemological tradition of our discipline, there is a “counter tradition which conceives of interpretation as going in just the opposite direction, from a verbal surface to the ‘vision’ that lies behind it [. . .], from the linear recitation of the text to the ‘structures’ or ‘forms’ that control its order” (Iconology 45). Indeed we are all familiar by now with the etymology of theory.
What Mitchell’s Art Forum article labeled the “pictorial turn” is underway. With Porter’s forecast and the goals of rhetorical education and critical pedagogy in mind, we offer this anthology in the hope of better equipping colleagues and students to grapple with the diverse texts they encounter in daily life.
Cultural Studies
In 1972, psychologist Rudolf Arnheim asserted in his groundbreaking book Visual Thinking that the visual is the “primary medium of thought” (18). The cognitive process, according to Arnheim, begins with identification of familiar objects, and concepts subsequently take form out of the subject’s lived experience and knowledge. More recently, Ann Marie Seward Barry examines emotional reactions to the visual and extends Arnheim’s work. She explains in Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication that our reactions to the visual are our first reactions—that “we begin to respond emotionally to situations before we can think them through” (18).
Barry indicates not only that visual images automatically evoke a stronger emotional reaction than discourse does, but also that our emotions make us especially receptive to images gratifying our preferences in art and design and in ideology. Attraction to the form of an image may lead us to accept its content indiscriminately because analysis would entail an extended, and at times irksome, process of thought. Hill and Helmers concur (33): “cultural studies,” they note, “constitute one type of attempt to understand how visual appeals operate” (26). Not surprisingly, the power of images is of concern to many teachers committed to critical pedagogy.
Art historian E. H. Gombrich argues in Art and Illusion a central assumption of visual critique in English studies—namely, that culture influences how we see. His exposition of the history of artistic styles illustrates his thesis regarding the cultural position of the painter: what matters is “not a faithful record of a visual experience but the faithful construction of a relational mode” (78), and the painter’s problem is one of “conjuring up a convincing image” (45). Gombrich cites, as one of many examples of the influence of culture on art, the landscape paintings of John Constable, whose familiarity with new methods of studying cloud formation may have made his innovative representations of the sky possible (20). Presumably it was because of his immersion in this cultural change that Constable was able to “break through” the artistic conventions of his day. According to Gombrich, such breakthroughs by “exceptional beings” mark changes in artistic style and tradition and are understood best in their cultural contexts (20). After being introduced to the works of painters such as Joseph Turner, Vasily Kandinsky, or Georgia O’Keefe, students of writing might explore the influence of cultural context and material conditions on the contributions of pivotal artists. Students might also gain insight into these issues by exploring the homelier industrial arts, as Maureen Daly Goggin does in her account of transformations in the situation of embroidery work during the print and Protestant revolutions.
Art critic John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is a short and highly readable critique of painting and commercial reproductions that is based on his 1970 BBC series on art. The author (and collaborators he names as helping to “make” [5] the book) asks what essential change occurs when original artwork is transformed into a reproduction. His response is “commercialization,” and his definition of image conforms to his thesis regarding the reproduction of art. Image, for Berger, is a “sight which has been recreated or reproduced” (9).
Ways of Seeing demonstrates that commercialization was a part of the early history of painting in the West, but on a smaller scale than occurs today. Although much of the value of an original painting derives ultimately from its ability to bring viewers close to the (usually dead) artist and the painting’s (often recondite) context, paintings have, from the beginning, belonged to the culture of the rich, whose portraits often have featured their material possessions (their clothing, buildings, elaborate gardens and grounds, and the “intimate” rooms of their homes) and evoked mythological themes investing the owners with heroic qualities.
Through reproductions, “great art” has entered the mainstream, but without training or educational support the general public has remained largely uninterested in “high” culture (33). Berger posits that, in its place, advertisements of glamorous lifestyles and locales are consumed by a mass audience that dreams of being rich. In representing wealth and luxury, advertisements often allude to painting styles (138). Fashion and beauty photography, for example, often mimics poses and settings of eighteenth and nineteenth century portrait painting. Such parallels suggest that one of the functions of high art in contemporary society is to feed capitalism.
Berger credits Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” published in l936, as the source of many ideas appearing in Ways of Seeing. Benjamin, a Jewish art critic and philosopher writing in Germany in the days leading up to the Second World War, decries mass-produced art for losing the “aura” of the original and for detaching the art object “from the domain of tradition” (223).1
Critical Approaches
Berger presents an analysis directed to a broad audience, but images also can be analyzed on the basis of semiotics, which derives from the philosophy of C. S. Peirce and whose concepts icon, index, and symbol, among others, have been appropriated by visual theorists. Loosely, icon refers to a sign bearing a resemblance, real or imaginary, to what it is meant to signify (e.g., images of a smiley face or of two hands shaking). Index refers to a physical indication that another thing exists (e.g., a jet stream or the howl of a coyote). Symbol refers to a sign whose connection to an object is culturally determined (e.g., most verbal language). Peirce, an American pragmatist, did not reject outright the assumption of a correspondence between material world and language, as many postmodernists have.
An alternative to Peirce’s semiotics can be found in the structuralist approach of Ferdinand de Saussure, which, as Stuart Hall explains, consists of a system of signs including images, words, and sounds (30). The signifier is the form itself, and the signified the idea or concept that accompanies it; the relation between them, the representation, is created through codes, or culturally agreed upon meanings and judgments (31). Because meaning is never fixed and always in flux, analysis is a requirement for understanding interpretation, and “[t]he reader is as important as the writer in the production of meaning” (33). Hall is a poststructuralist who uses structuralism in a modified and flexible way to highlight the power system of cultural signs (35).
Image-Music-Text, one of French critic Roland Barthes’s many works, elaborates a semiological theory to critique a variety of artifacts, both verbal and visual. Barthes argues in this book and in Mythologies that, whether in advertising or in other media, representations repeated over time become cultural myths that the public immediately recognizes and responds to in predictable ways. Without either means or motivation to understand their responses, viewers do not consciously notice the strategic character of the message they encounter and so react as its designers have anticipated—positively. To illustrate, Image-Music-Text describes a Panzini spaghetti ad incorporating a photograph of packaged pasta, spice mixture, and canned liquid surrounded by fresh tomatoes, onions, peppers, and mushrooms spilling from a string bag, as if just brought from the market. According to Barthes, the greens, reds, and yellows and the name of the product all suggest “Italianicity.” The arrangement, which echoes a still-life painting, signifies that the packaged ingredients are both authentically Italian and fresh (33–36). The myth created through the confluence of signs evoking an Italian dinner within the ambiance of a Mediterranean patio Barthes describes as “purified” and “simplified,” offered “without contradictions” (Image 143).
Authenticity and Exploitation
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes in Photography: A Middle-Brow Art how the photo album conveys a narrative of historical unity to the present generation by illuminating the “highest common denominator of the past” (31). Informal photographs of children, often on special occasions or holidays, serve as an authorized “social memory” of family members and good times (31). Family portraits also allow ancestors to be paid due reverence while, and—as often can be the case—by, erasing the accompanying, unpleasant details of their lives. Barthes observes in his treatise on photography, Camera Lucida, that in private photography both photographer and subject are aware of the artificiality of their joint activity: “I lend myself to the social game,” he muses. “I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing” (11). Moreover, while the image is “motionless, stubborn,” the subject is “divided, dispersed” (12). Bourdieu, like Barthes, speaks of the artificiality of the pose, which allows the photographer to impose a concealed gaze on subjects, forcing them into stiff and contrived positions. Subjects, in turn, may respond by attempting to gather dignity through a conventional frontal pose. Bourdieu explains that “frontality is a means of effecting one’s own objectification” because it offers “a way of imposing the rules of one’s own perception” (83). On the other hand, hopes for creating impressions on our viewers are often unrealistic. In his essay “The Photograph,” N. Scott Momaday describes the disgust an American Indian expressed upon viewing a likeness of herself. Her reaction led Momaday to wonder if “perhaps she saw, in a way that we could not, that the photograph misrepresented her in some crucial respect, that in its dim, mechanical eye it had failed to see into her real being” (McQuade and McQuade 291). Figure 1 reproduces an image of and a text by Anh Thuy (Cindy) Dang, a student in one of our classes whose reflections on a photograph taken of her at Georgia’s Red Top Mountain during a family outing alludes to the dilemmas attending personal photography.
Although other postmodern critics have tended to study the problematics of photographic representation (e.g., John Tagg, who takes the commonly held position that no photograph mirrors reality), Barthes considers photographs the quintessential evidence that “the thing has been there” (76). He argues in Camera Lucida that, in photographic portraits with personal connections to the reader, authentication of existence is a primary outcome. Susan Sontag, writing before him in On Photography, agrees that photography confirms existence—to a point. But, crucially for Sontag, an image is not a transparent copy of reality but a distortion. Sontag is featured in a New York Times Magazine article on the Abu Ghraib prison scandals. In this debate, she returns to Barthes’s emphasis on the importance of the photograph in affirming that an event did occur. However, the use of a photograph can drastically change its effect. Sontag concludes that “[w]e make of photography a means by which, precisely, anything can be said, any purpose served” (On Photography 175). New York Times reviewer Michael Kimmelmann describes an art exhibition of the prison photographs held just five months after their publication on the Internet. He expresses surprise at both the multifarious purposes of photography and its potential for almost immediate reinterpretation. However, in her study of cartoon images appearing on the occasion of the death of JFK Jr. and alluding to the historic photograph of the young boy saluting his father’s coffin, Janis Edwards asserts that “It is not unusual for iconic images to be appropriated to new contexts, creating analogies that recall past moments and suggest future possibilities” (179).
One of the many purposes to which photography can be put is illustrated by David Perlmutter’s Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crisis, which describes the process whereby journalistic photographs at times exert so intense a pressure on public opinion that history is altered significantly. Since its inception, documentary photography, which evolved from photo journalism, has featured a series of artistic images that serve as powerful rhetorical instruments for social change. For example, in the early twentieth century, sociologist and photographer Lewis W. Hine created a series of pictures of immigrants at Ellis Island. He illustrated in further photos their miserable living and working conditions, including the exploitation of their children working in factories, documentary images that led to sweeping changes in child labor laws (Newhall 235).
Like the general public, students typically are unaware of the rhetorical strategies that photographers adopt when constructing, for example, angle, lighting, and background. James Curtis reveals in Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth that in the 1930s the Farm Security Administration (FSA) hired established photographers to create an image of the rural crisis of the Great Depression that organizers wished to use in convincing the public of the need for their program. FSA photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others posed families in their poverty-stricken surroundings to create images of nobility and courage. “Migrant Mother,” a portrait by Lange that has become an icon of the era, features a grouping of small children leaning against the shoulders of a soulful mother, who is holding her youngest baby. The tableau recalls paintings of the Madonna, Christ child, and angels, and not surprisingly, this photograph and many like it in the FSA accounts were posed carefully. For example, four of the older children of the family were excluded from the final portrait for fear of upsetting the cultural norms of the intended audience, who likely would have disapproved of such a large family among the poor (Curtis 53–55). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the much-loved chronicle of Alabama sharecroppers by James Agee and Evans, also was staged to emphasize its subjects’ courage and steadfast character. Evans and Agee, who lived among the sharecroppers, produced conflicting visual and verbal accounts. Whereas Agee wrote of a certain bed as “stale, and moist, and [. . .] morbid with bed bugs, with fleas and, I believe, with lice” (qtd. in Curtis 37), Evans photographed the spare geometric shape of the bed and the contrast of a white bedspread against the dark walls of the room, producing the clean and cared-for interior of poverty that constituted one of his many art photographs in the book.
Recent analysis by John Tagg in The Burden of Representation reveals that weighty political and social injustices have been committed by means of what is labeled blandly “documentary photography” when its products are used in institutional recordkeeping. The poor, the weak, and the powerless have, throughout the history of photography, been victimized by prison, institutional, and other bureaucratic photographers. An example of how documentary photography can disempower its subjects is provided by the work of Edward Curtis, who, with the backing of financier John Pierpont Morgan, photographed American Indians in contrived settings and costumes (Newhall 136). More recently, Richard Billingham’s photography documents in livid detail the life of his chronically alcoholic father. These images, which have appeared in major art venues including the Royal Academy, by virtue of representing an inebriated subject who likely was not able to give informed consent to having his photographs taken, exhibited, and mass marketed, may also be exploitative. We might add to this list the photography of Abu Ghraib prison torture and ask to what extent the mainstream media, in reproducing the photographs, have further exploited their subjects.
Gender and Women’s Studies
Many poststructuralist accounts of women and the visual are available. Berger discusses in his chapter on the female nude the central questions of who looks and who is looked at. Laura Mulvey’s useful article on “the gaze” addresses both portraits and film. Carol David offers in “Investitures of Power: Portraits of Women Executives” an account of the representations of women that traces painting styles through the last three centuries. She describes how representations of beautiful women traditionally were objects desired and possessed by men, with the exception of those of a few powerful sitters who demanded they be the subject rather than the object of a viewer’s gaze. Queen Elizabeth, for instance, was careful to be painted in imperial settings. Likewise, certain suffragists, accounted plain in their simple black dresses, nevertheless looked directly at the camera—a pose owned by men and the rare powerful woman. The notorious “Madame X,” by John Singer Sargent, casts a disdainful gaze at her viewers, a pose that scorned cultural expectations. Despite Sargent’s social banishment from France for this scandalous portrait, Madame Gatreaux was an instant sensation and continues to rivet audiences more than a century later. David Blakesley’s “Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock’s Vertigo” offers psychological insight into “the gaze” by suggesting that it can be read as a sign of the masculine need to identify and to become consubstantial with the feminine. “Pushed to the extreme,” Blakesley notes, the male voyeur wishes “to become the other, to inhabit that psychological and physical space” (117).
Julia Margaret Cameron challenged Victorian social hierarchy in her photographic portraits of women. Instead of portraying the rich and famous, she often chose as subjects servants or peasants from her home on the Isle of Wight, dressing them in period costumes to represent religious or classical characters. She also chose as sitters members of her own family, including Julia Stephens, the mother of Virginia Wolfe. Unlike the popular photographs of the day, which depicted women as tranquil and expressionless, Cameron’s portraits depicted her sitters as pensive, longing, or suffering (Wolf). Frances Benjamin Johnston flouted the gender norms of the same era by photographing herself with beer mug, cigarette, and petticoats hiked up to her knees, as if engaged in debate with an imaginary partner or with the portraits of men arranged on her fireplace mantel (Figure 2). Contemporary artist Cindy Sherman has photographed herself posing in a variety of settings that depict the restricted roles available to women.
Current tensions and ambiguities arising from the outworking of women’s emancipation are alluded to in J. Cherie Strachan and Kathleen E. Kendall’s study of convention films viewed during the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Strachan and Kendall note that the presentation of George W. Bush as a “kinder and gentler” Bush candidate and the choice to downplay his position as Governor of Texas and to focus on Laura and Barbara rather than on George Senior—that is, “to distance [George W.] Bush from stereotypical masculine institutions and activities”—may have been intentional strategies to gain favor with women voters, who had not yet proved a reliable base of support, and to distance him from his father, so that the son would seem “his own man” (150).
As Diane S. Hope explains, “Like verbal rhetoric, visual rhetoric depends on strategies of identification; advertising’s rhetoric is dominated by appeals to gender as the primary marker of consumer identity. Constructs of masculine and feminine contextualize fantasies of social role, power, status, and security” (155). Hope’s study of advertising images that appropriate feminine (passive, fertile, receptive) and masculine (active, dominating, aggressive) iconographies in natural settings notes that this “rhetoric of gendered environments works to obscure the connections between environmental degradation and consumption” (156). According to Hope, advertising that incorporated natural images before the mechanical revolution tended to present the earth as a powerful mother; later images, on the other hand, presented the earth as a sexualized other awaiting exploitation. Viewers in the United States respond favorably to the latter because so many of us have intent and means to use the earth’s resources as we see fit. At the same time, women viewers are disempowered by omnipresent advertising imagery that equates femininity with an idealized physical presence and an undernourished agency (173).
Science Studies
Elizabeth Tebeaux records in “From Orality to Textuality: Technical Description and the Emergence of Visual and Verbal Presentation” that before the explosion of print technology, the visual in technical contexts was much more closely aligned with orality than with discourse. That the usefulness of visual representation to instruction already was recognized helps explain its ready adoption in the earliest print manuscripts on technical subjects. According to Tebeaux, “the increasingly integrated verbal and visual presentation of objects and concepts captured and molded into text” has been a feature of English technical communication since at least the time of Chaucer, and bivocality had emerged as conventional by 1640 (176).
Goggin states that by the late 1600s, the craft of embroidered samplers “was on the cusp of a radical shift from invention to demonstration of knowledge” (101), an observation confirming that utilitarianism was gaining momentum in England with the increasing use of the printing press. At this time, a revolution fueled by the burgeoning need for informative text among newly literate and upwardly mobile readers was occurring in the use and the construction of images. Two centuries before, Leonardo had resurrected the cadaver as an object of scrutiny, and as a result anatomical representations appeared vitalized. As the technology of visual reproduction evolved—as copyists no longer were depended upon to reproduce illustrations; as copper etchings, which allowed for much greater detail work than woodcuts had, became the norm; and as three-point perspective became widely used and understood—the possibility for verisimilitude exploded. As illustrators struggled to create ever-more convincingly realistic representations, a technical culture in which a vast audience of readers relied increasingly on illustrated texts, at the expense of the oral tradition, emerged (Tebeaux, “Emergence,” passim).
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar argue in Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts that the scientific method arose not from a new way of thinking, but from a new way of seeing. According to these authors and others, the scientific and technical project, out of which has arisen industrial and now postmodern culture, is profoundly indebted to the reproducibility and, most crucially, the contrastibility of visual artifacts forming what these authors consider to be the ultimate basis of scientific claims. Supporting the significance of visual contrastibility to science, Helmers notes “the developing importance of sight, seeing, and collecting visual objects” during the Enlightenment (emphasis ours; Pears and Jardine, 71–72).
Scientific representations remain, however, thoroughly constructed, thoroughly rhetorical—a fact all too easy for viewers to forget. Paul Dombrowski records in “Ernst Haeckel’s Controversial Visual Rhetoric” how the German naturalist and illustrator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries deliberately misrepresented the embryos of a variety of animals and humans in his line drawings, presumably to substantiate his theory of monism, which viewed science as “including areas of knowledge usually not associated with science, such as religion, ethics, and politics” (305). His broad definition of science appealed to leaders of the Nazi movement because it could be used to promote the idea of national history and identity. Ultimately, Haeckel’s work was implicated in the propaganda efforts of the Nazis, who propounded social Darwinism. His theories were debunked, but not before many textbooks in the United States and elsewhere had incorporated his illustrations; recently, they have become evidence for some creationists in their critique of evolutionary biology.
Today, scientist-photographers commonly accept as legitimate an array of rhetorical practices including but by no means limited to colorizing, selecting, and retouching. Anne R. Richards addresses scientific license in “Argument and Authority in the Visual Representations of Science” by deconstructing a series of images appearing in one figure in the American Journal of Botany: 19 photomicrographs and, curiously, one line drawing created to replace a photographic image. According to Nels Lersten, her interview subject and former editor of the journal, such a drawing might constitute an instance of “nature-faking” because the original photograph required enhancement if it was to be mustered in support of the author’s claim. Just as among the readers of advertising it is understood that photography illustrates a product in an ideal state, among expert readers of science it is understood that photographic images represent a claim in its most persuasively constructed visual form.
Technical and Professional Communication
“A Historical Look at Electronic Literacy: Implications for the Education of Technical Communicators,” Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher’s article on the uses of electronic communication at the end of the twentieth century, predicts that rapid changes will continue to occur and that technical communicators will need to learn and to apply the latest advances. But in a review of books he sees as primarily lauding the electronic age, Stephen Doheny-Farina warns that many consequences of this rapid change need assessment, among them the loss of direct communication among individuals. Craig Stroupe emphasizes the need for teachers in the digital classroom to move beyond the instrumental objectives often implicit in institutional initiatives and to guide students towards a “constitutive literacy,” one in which dialogue among multimedia voices, e.g., between image and sound, is discernible and the image-word relation is not merely illustrative. Ideally, according to Stroupe, voices will be given reign to “speak to one another” (“The Rhetoric of Irritation,” 245) through a “coherent inappropriateness” (251) enabling students to discover the ideological basis of culture. Stroupe’s thoughtful critique, however, evidences limited tolerance for the traditionally utilitarian aims of technical writing—that is, for the honing of language enabling “work to get done” in an, or the most, efficient way. It should be mentioned here that because the field of technical communication must concern itself, in part, with technological changes transforming communication in science and industry, it has been among the first specialities within English studies to widely acknowledge the importance of visual rhetoric. Stephen Bernhardt’s 1986 article “Seeing the Text” is groundbreaking in its explanation of the importance of design to readability in a range of fields and audiences.
Charles Kostelnick, who has written extensively on the history and theory of visual design, details a rubric for visual design in “A Systematic Approach to Visual Language in Business Communication.” Recently, he describes in “Melting-Pot Ideology, Modernist Aesthetics, and the Emergence of Graphical Conventions: The Statistical Atlases of the United States, 1874–1925” a history of graphics beginning in the early nineteenth century, when the U.S. government published statistical atlases of census data on immigrants. The designers of these atlases developed conventions that still influence the graphical presentation of data.
Jacques Bertin applies a semiotic approach to the creation of graphs, maps, and diagrams. He differentiates between monosemic systems, where meanings are specified and clearly understood, i.e., the graphic meaning, and polysemic systems, in which readers choose from a group of similar signs, making signification comparatively subjective (2). His discussion of size, value, texture, color, orientation, and shape in graphic design provide a useful framework for analysis and discussion of visual artifacts.
Edward R. Tufte, coiner of the term chartjunk, complicates the discussion of graphic displays in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by addressing the dangers of uncritically accepting visual representations of data. Likewise, Carlos Salinas reprimands technical communicators for approaching the visual primarily as a vehicle for disseminating truth and for failing to exploit its many potentials, especially for cultural critique. His article “Technical Rhetoricians and the Art of Configuring Images” describes Punk Ska’s 1998 anti-Nike website, which reconfigures the swoosh as a “modified swastika” and adds the slogan “Nike: Made by Kids in Sweat Shops” (178) to illustrate how multimedia texts can be reread.
Donna Kienzler applies in “Visual Ethics” general ethical principles to the selection of material for visual displays in professional communication documents as well as to their design and identifies criteria for evaluating visual data. Nancy Allen’s “Ethics and Visual Rhetorics: Seeing’s Not Believing Anymore” provides instruction and examples for the ethical construction of visuals, and lists visual rhetoric sources that would be helpful to professional communicators working on visual design. David critiques the ethics of the elaborate visuals placed in corporate annual reports, asserting that the “reports” are mythmaking documents rather than objective summaries of the year’s activities (“Mythmaking”).
Among those writers who have lamented the slow incorporation of a broader rhetorical focus into technical communication curricula are Richards and David. We point out in “Decorative Color as a Rhetorical Enhancement on the World Wide Web” that the widely circulated advice to avoid color in technical documents unless for logical purposes is anachronistic, for color obviously commands the attention of readers of technical information in hybrid documents, both in print and on the Web. Thus, we encourage colleagues to reconsider the assumptions that the decorative is irrelevant to students of technical and writing, or that attempts to study the decorative are doomed to be “non-rigorous” (Helmers and Hill 2), and to conduct research into the pathos of technical writing. We agree with Helmers’ assessment that theories of visual rhetoric provide opportunities to “unhing[e] the traditional dynamic of pleasure/expressiveness and function/persuasiveness in favor of a dialogic, transactional viewing” (65).
Pedagogical Approaches
Several books have been published recently that respond to the burgeoning interest in visual and verbal intersections in the writing classroom. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers’s anthology, Defining Visual Rhetorics, offers a rich menu of visual genres useful to teachers and scholars in rhetoric and communication disciplines; the text has generated thoughtful discussion in our graduate document design courses, and this introductory chapter has cited numerous essays from the text. Charles Kostelnick and David D. Roberts’s textbook Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators covers visual theory and application for advanced college students in business and technical majors. Nancy Allen’s Working with Words and Images: New Steps in an Old Dance constructs a broadly interdisciplinary context for the visual. Donald and Christine McQuade’s Seeing and Writing 2 provides provocative images, texts, and assignments for students of first-year writing. Christine Alfano and Alyssa O’Brien’s Envision: Persuasive Writing in a Visual World teaches these same students to analyze and to understand visual texts as essential to effective writing. And Lester Faigley, Diana George, Anna Palchick, and Cynthia Selfe’s Picturing Texts provides suggestions for students evaluating and producing visual artifacts.
In our classrooms, when we have offered discussions and assignments invoking painting, architecture, sculpture, and photography, most students have accepted these subjects readily. When creating writing assignments and discussion topics for classes in composition, rhetorical analysis, cultural studies, and professional and technical writing, we have supplied students with materials from art books and from museum websites. Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception offers chapters on the elements of visual composition and contains many examples that could be of use to teachers contemplating assignments along similar lines.
Titles of books on women, both as artists and as models, are included in David’s article “Investitures of Power.” Paintings of women by the Pre-Raphaelites (who worshipped female beauty while treating their beautiful wives and models carelessly), as well as other well-known portraits and their contexts, will interest students, as we have found, and may motivate them to bring in favorite reproductions of their own. Assignments drawing on the history of portraiture style might ask students to find family pictures, old and new, in order to analyze the expressions and configurations of sitters, or to examine the styles of portraiture in different cultural and historic contexts. Figure 3 presents very different photographic representations of couples from the mid-eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries; these juxtapositions suggest that popular styles of intimate portraiture are influenced by artistic conventions.
Helpful sources for teachers conducting discussions and creating writing assignments around photography are Lemagny and Ruille’s A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives and The History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall, both of which present a history of photographic styles. And many early images now are available on the Web. As Institutional Repositories (such as Emory University’s
Library-of-Congress-funded Meta-Archive of Southern Culture) go online, students with access to the Internet will have virtually limitless accessibility to the gamut of photographic genres. In addition to researching such archives, students might bring in pictures from their own “galleries” to analyze.
Recently, one of us taught a special-topics first-year composition course focusing on visual rhetoric. Students discussed and wrote about images including those that appeared in traveling photography exhibits, which many postsecondary institutions, including our own, house regularly. The WebCT post appearing in Figure 4 reproduces text written by Katie Jezghani after a visit to the Kennesaw State University campus exhibit “Beggars and Choosers: Motherhood is Not a Class Privilege in America.” Jezghani and her classmates had been assigned to choose one photograph in the exhibit to describe and to analyze in terms of Ryan Jervings’s rubric “Thirteen Ways to Read a Black-and-White Photograph,” which appears later in this book.
Students can also benefit from opportunities to write about the visual as part of a more materially complex and paratextually informed situation, that is, as signs appearing in grocery stores (Dickinson and Maugh), gardens (Lambert and Martinez), homes (Tange), suburbs (Robbins), and a great variety of public and private spaces.
Drawing extensively on the tradition of the ancients, the first chapter of our collection, Nancy Allen’s “Seeing Rhetoric: A Foundational Approach,” highlights the complementarities between verbal and visual modes of communication. Using a variety of professional examples to support her explanation, Allen catalogues the visual applications of the rhetorical appeals, canon, and triangle and provides a solid working model for writing teachers who wish to introduce students to the elements of visual rhetoric.
“Mediated Memory: The Language of Memorial Space” describes how L. J. Nicoletti’s students studied a site that was of special interest to them and then designed and wrote a text justifying the creation of a new memorial. Nicoletti focuses on the fourth canon of rhetoric by deconstructing the “seeming rhetorical sanctity” of this architectural form and asks students to consider issues such as rhetorical purpose, context, and audience in light of memorial architecture, as well as the goals of inclusiveness (remembrance) and originality. Developed in the aftermath of 9/11, her approach demonstrates how writing projects incorporating the visual can resonate in students’ lives.
Barbara Worthington and Deborah Rard’s “Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers: Using Documentary Film in Classroom Instruction” describes the authors’ film-based methods for teaching the principles of rhetorical analysis to first-year students. By thoughtfully viewing a documentary containing a narrative of a fatal drunk-driving accident, students develop awareness of rhetoric’s terms and functions. The chapter includes an analysis of student discussions of visual arguments arising from and directed at viewers in different socioeconomic contexts.
C. Richard King’s chapter, “Envisioning Justice: Racial Metaphors, Political Movements, and Critical Pedagogy,” describes an advanced writing unit on race, social justice, and culture. Asserting that white supremacy is a “structured field of vision no less than systems of economic, political, and social relations,” King examines how “metaphors, analogies, and juxtapositions” buttress racialization. His chapter also highlights the complexities raised by the images, slogans, and advertisements of social organizations invoking victimization.
Jane Davis wrote “Seeing the Unspeakable: Emmett Till and American Terrorism” in response to the fiftieth anniversary of the lynching of Till, a 14-year-old African-American who was gruesomely tortured and murdered by white men for whistling at one of their wives. Horrific photographs of Till maimed in his coffin brought home the reality of racist violence and outraged people across the United States, helping give force to the nascent Civil Rights Movement. Davis illustrates both the power of visual media and the role of images in perpetuating and combating racism.
“A Study of Photographs of Iran: Postcolonial Inquiry into the Limits of Visual Representation,” by Iraj Omidvar, notes that in the United States visual representations of Muslims generally and of Iranians specifically have been ubiquitous—and negative—since 9/11. Yet countering these visual stereotypes without resorting to an objectivist stance requires a commitment to teacher-student dialogue in the spirit of Socratic elenchos. Omidvar suggests that teachers and students trace the roots of racist images by engaging in research designed to illuminate the material bases of stereotyping.
Yong-Kang Wei’s chapter, “Ethos on the Web: A Cross-Cultural Approach,” highlights differences between rhetorics of “East” and “West.” After identifying key concepts of classical Western rhetoric and providing an overview of classical Chinese rhetoric as it occurs in speech, architecture, landscape, and document design, Wei demonstrates how Chinese hypertext reflects its cultural and rhetorical traditions. His chapter has served as a provocative starting point for courses addressing cross-cultural professional communication.
Jean Darcy describes in “Christopher Columbus’s Maps: Visualizing Discovery” a project exemplifying Mitchell’s analysis of the verbal-visual relation. Her assignments for courses, from beginning to advanced, require students not only to use maps and textual sources in extrapolating the critical thinking processes of Columbus in his “New World” voyages but also to investigate their own methods of learning and knowing. Her original assignment is open to a variety of artifacts and could be adapted easily to technical writing syllabi.
Alyssa O’Brien describes in “Drawn to Multiple Sides: Making Arguments Visible” an assignment for which students choose images and create texts to explore alternative viewpoints. The Feature Articles Multiple Sides Project elicits from students rhetorical analyses, new perspectives, innovative approaches to visual layout, and stylistic experiments in voice. This chapter provides examples of student writing and offers a companion webpage.
Ryan Jerving’s rubric “Thirteen Ways to Read a Black-and-White Photograph” identifies key compositional elements in black-and-white photography and highlights their potential influences on interpretation. Jerving also presents an activity that will help students of writing develop a rhetorical appreciation for the photograph as a designed object by considering the key issues of its subject matter, camera work, scene of representation, and institutional location.
Mark Mullen’s chapter, “Collapsing Floors and Disappearing Walls: Teaching Visual and Cultural Intertexts in Electronic Games,” recommends that teachers import electronic games as objects of analysis into the writing classroom. While preparing teachers for the challenges that can attend analysis of this genre in typical wired classrooms, Mullen explains how the visual elements of games can require interpretive strategies as complex as those applied to traditional literary texts. His analysis of American McGee’s Alice demonstrates that electronic games can be sophisticated texts suited to college-level analysis.
Kristin Walker Pickering’s “Revising for Activity Purposes: Improving Document Design for Reader-Oriented Activities” considers the relevance of activity theory to the human factors of website design. Focusing on the effective integration of text and graphics from a user-design perspective, Pickering discusses work her students have undertaken in revising workplace documents. To illustrate how complex the analysis of users and stakeholders can be as well as the usefulness of activity theory in facilitating analysis, Walker focuses on the efforts of a student to make a state government website more readable.
In the Western tradition, the value of sense data to inquiry was a driving question 2,600 years ago among the presocratics. Heraclitus concluded that “sight tells falsehoods” (McKirahan 118) although the eyes are yet “more accurate witnesses than the ears” (119). Parmenides claimed that mortals were benighted because they accepted as reality what they saw; Anaxogoras’s paradox of color illustrated this same point. But Empedocles articulated an ancient rationale for triangulation, enjoining the inquirer to allow the mind to question the certainties of the senses, and the senses to destabilize the mind’s cherished beliefs:
Look with every means of apprehension, in whatever way each thing is clear, Not holding any sight more in trust than [what comes] through hearing, Or loud-sounding hearing above the things made clear by the tongue, And do not hold back trust in any of the other members, Whatever way there is a channel for understanding, but Understanding each thing in whatever way it is clear. (McKirahan 235)
Empedocles’s point was not to privilege any one of the senses, but to utilize each as fully as possible. From this perspective, an interest in the visual and in the study of alternative theories, methodologies, tools, and worldviews that such an interest entails, would advantage the inquirer-writer. We believe that by cultivating new approaches to thinking, knowing, and communicating, our students may find themselves making a habit of the wonder that formed the daily diet of those remarkable inquirers who puzzled through reality in a less fragmented time.
Note
1. Because Benjamin committed suicide on meeting resistance during an attempt to leave Paris during the occupation and emigrate to the United States, most of his work was published posthumously, writes Hannah Arendt in the introduction to Illuminations, which reprints “The Work of Art” from Zeischrift für Sozialforschun (Journal for Social Research) V 1936.
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