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Week Eleven: Visual Rhetoric Strikes Back

Week Eleven: Visual Rhetoric Strikes Back

I was going to call this post “The Passion of the Visual Rhetoric” but realized instantly how awful that would be…

As teachers of writing and reading, I think it’s absolutely critical that our rhetorical study extends to the visual. I’m a little bothered by the fact that in our first-year General Studies Writing classes, teaching visual rhetoric is just an “option.” I get the impression that it’s actually somewhat discouraged because perhaps this program thinks that students at this level “don’t get it.” Perhaps it is taught in more advanced comp classes, but I really think we’re doing a disservice to our first-year students by not offering an entry point into visual rhetoric.

Mary Hocks made an excellent point in her essay when she stated that “these distinctions between ‘visual culture’ and ‘print culture’ that separate image and word within humanities scholarship are symptomatic of what Bruno Latour calls modernist thinking—the binary-based thinking that posits radical paradigm shifts from one communications medium to another [. . .] we ought to stress the continuum between visual and verbal forms of expression (204). I think that by ignoring visual culture in our writing classes, we are reinforcing this binary-based thinking Hocks references.

Anger Alert

I have to say that I think it’s a bit of an insult to our first-year students to assume that they “don’t get” visual rhetoric, or to presume that they wouldn’t understand it even if it was taught to them. No generation of young Americans has been as steeped in visual culture as the generation currently embarking on their first year of higher education. The problem is that our teaching has not caught up. Actually, our entire educational paradigm needs an overhaul if we are going to be able to empower students who come of age in this visual culture.

Soapbox Time

At OU, one of our assignments attempted to integrate visual rhetoric; it was a visual analysis/evaluative argument focusing on magazine advertisements. While students were not encouraged to compose visually, they had to provide a hyperaccurate, ekphrastic summary of the visual text they were analyzing before they began to pick it apart. While I don’t deny that there are numerous benefits to ekphrastic exercises, I can’t help but think that this assignment is again reinforcing that binary mode of thinking: “you may look at these visual pieces but you may not touch, manipulate, re-envision or re-create them, and they are certainly not appropriate modes of composition for you (though they are certainly an acceptable mode for those in power, like advertisers).” [Gosh, I’m such a Marxist! Hey, I’m proud to be one.]

Another problem: focusing on advertisements defeats the goal of rhetorical education. As Hocks says, “What students don’t always realize is that anything presented on the screen is rhetorical” (204). Students know that ads are meant to sell things. The purposes of other visual media can be more abstract. Once, I had my students analyze CD covers instead of advertisements. Yes, I know that album covers are advertisements, too, but they do serve other purposes. Anyway, my kids really struggled with them at first, even though I gave them a series of questions to ponder. Many of them never got there, and I really despaired of the exercise, until I realized that these students were never given a critical apparatus with which to examine visual culture alongside verbal.

Electronic visual culture could help rearrange this binary means of thinking, because the web is so fluid. But, only if students have access to it, and begin composing with it at an early age.

Harrumph!