Defining Visual Rhetorics

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. Annotation 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 Rhetoricsis 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 Economics, Finance, Business & Industry Book Cover 1 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Preface 10 Introduction 14 Chapter One The Psychology of Rhetorical Images 38 Chapter Two The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments 54 Chapter Three Framing the Fine Arts Through Rhetoric 76 Chapter Four Visual Rhetoric in Pens of Steel and Inks of Silk: Challenging the Great Visual/Verbal Divide 100 Chapter Five Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock’s Vertigo 124 Chapter Six Political Candidates’ Convention Films: Finding the Perfect Image—An Overview of Political Image Making 148 Chapter Seven Gendered Environments: Gender and the Natural World in the Rhetoric of Advertising 168 Chapter Eight Echoes of Camelot: How Images Construct Cultural Memory Through Rhetorical Framing 192 Chapter Nine Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual: The Photograph and the Archive 208 Chapter Ten Melting-Pot Ideology, Modernist Aesthetics, and the Emergence of Graphical Conventions: The Statistical Atlases of the United States, 1874–1925 228 Chapter Eleven The Rhetoric of Irritation: Inappropriateness as Visual/Literate Practice 256 Chapter Twelve Placing Visual Rhetoric: Finding Material Comfort in Wild Oats Market 272 Chapter Thirteen Envisioning Domesticity, Locating Identity: Constructing the Victorian Middle Class Through Images of Home 290 Chapter Fourteen Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory 316 About the Contributors 328 Author Index 332 Subject Index 338 Studing the relationship of visual images to persuasion, this book analyzes a wide variety of visual modes of communication that demonstrate some of the variety among the many kinds of texts that could be considered instances of visual rhetoric