viz. blogs

Year's Recap

Aubri Plourde — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 19:22:19 +0000

My colleagues have listed their own top picks from this year's array of insights an analyses. You'll notice a few repeats on my list--a sure sign of their success--but I'll admit, choosing a representative sample is a hard task. We should all go back and reread the blog, just in case...

Without further preamble, then, here are my favorite posts of 2014-2015:

Rhiannon's "Taste vs. Enjoyment." I'm sure any grad student will identify with Rhiannon's opening observation that books on her nightstand fall into two piles: "those which we should read and those which we want to read." As someone who also works on less-canonized texts, the "taste vs. enjoyment" tension is particularly fraught--especially because, as Rhiannon says, most of our opinions about "good taste" are really just thin perceptions.

Casey Sloan's "Moving Targets: Player Choice and the Politics of Bioshock: Infinite." Casey guest-wrote this post for me, and I'm delighted to be able to endorse it again. I don't know a lot about video games, but I was totally sold by Casey's reading, which looks at the scripting of the game to explicate "an unwillingness on the part of game's designers to commit to any single motivation for the character." Omitting the nuance in the game's racial politics, she writes, also ignores "the idea that racism in its most insidious form is less about villainy and more about institutionalized, systemic, and normalized violence. Paying attention to how games interpellate players and direct player experience through game elements like choice and decision making can yield rich readings inaccessible through purely literary or cinematic criticism."

Deb Streusand's "Alice or Wonderland: How Visual Representations of a Story Change Over Time." I'll freely admit, Deb's post on Alice cover arts has all the ingredients for catching my attention: children's literature, a current exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center, and a lovely analyis of how cover art reflects the changing values of parents and publishers.

My favorite post to write this year is a tie. I had a great time writing my "Food Porn Roundup: The Seven Deadly Desserts" which explores the dialogue over guilt and sweets. It isn't particularly insightful, but I loved thinking about the seven deadly sins almsot as much as I enjoyed committing all of the food sins on that list. And, as I mentioned above, I'm a sucker for analyses that use the Harry Ransom Center and children's culture, so my other favorite is my very first post for viz., "The Serpent Was a Creeper: Religious Representations of Animals and Humanity in Children's Literature." Any chance I get to expound upon religious adaptation, children's books, or creepy illustrations!

That's all, folks. Thanks for reading, and keep an eye out for the next set of viz. posts in the fall!

Tags:

nostalgia

Visual Rhetoric

appreciation

video games

adaptations

My 5 Favorite Posts of the Year

Scott Garbacz — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 22:53:48 +0000

Image credit: Know Your Meme.

It's been a rather rich year at Viz, and it's nearly impossible to choose just five blogs. That said, here are a few I found particularly striking, fun, or thought-provoking:

"Strong is the New Skinny, OR: Why I hate the Strong Female Character" by Aubri. I admit, this subject has been on my mind a lot, and I even touched on it in my discussion of The Lego Movie. The "Strong Female Character" seems to be the newest cliche in every Hollywood film, and for a while the dominance of this trope had concerned me. This post explains, I think, a lot of my objections. As Aubri writes, "By allowing 'strength' to stand in for any positive attribute, we become complicit in a cultural agenda that marginalizes the communal, the vulnerable, the soft." Thus while "'Strength' has such positive connotation that to test its limits feels unnatural, even anti-feminist," we ought to be careful to remember that the way we present strength--especially in terms of Young Adult book covers that emphasize and celebrate character's isolation from social support and self-reliance--is not an unambiguous virtue. But read the article, if you haven't; there's a lot more to it than my summary describes.

"Words, Words, Words: Judging Hamlet by its Cover" by Deb. So, I'm a nerd, and I can't resist a discussion that discusses the cover for The Klingon Hamlet. But re-reading this post as part of my year-end review, I was struck by the way contemporary Hamlet titles participate in a neoliberal marketing strategy similar to that discussed by Aubri above. It is true, of course, that issues of individual identity, social isolation, and death are integral to Hamlet, but so are issues of social corruption ("there is something rotten in the state of Denmark"), political duties, and interpersonal relationships. It is interesting, then, that modern presentations of Hamlet are almost entirely univocal in their presentation of a single character, whether it is the Danish prince himself or his doomed lover Ophelia.

"Big Hero 6 and the Consolations of Violence" by me. In many ways this post echoes my favorite post of last year, "Lilo and Stitch: The Danger of Beautiful Stories." Both articles examine kid's movies that provide painful correctives to the mindless narratives fostered by other works. Lilo and Stitch takes on the pristine body images found in dolls and fairy-tales, while Big Hero 6 provides a more painful, less violent way of dealing with grief and building community than that modeled in Guardians of the Galaxy. What particularly draws me to these stories is both the way they remind us of the pain more conventional genres conceal, and the way they do this without abandoning their roles of providing engaging, kid-friendly entertainment. I found Big Hero 6 to be "less escapist, more grounded in visible human experience, and ultimately more thoughtful" than the adult-targeted superhero film it followed.

"Taste vs. Enjoyment" by Rhiannon. At Viz, we're pretty good at discussing visual culture; it is, as they say, what we do. But what I particularly love about this post is that it contributes to visual rhetoric. The article's infographic presents different book covers on a graph, drawn from 170 anonymous survey respondents, charted in terms of their entertainment value and "highbrow" nature. The post thus provides an interesting, if incomplete, snapshot of the way people perceive "canonicity" and literary pleasure today.

"Moving Targets: Player Choice and the Politics of Bioshock: Infinite" by Casey. Video games are still in a somewhat anomolous position when it comes to cultural criticism. On one hand, they clearly participate in familiar forms of visual and narrative rhetoric; video games often have stories, always have carefully crafted images, &c. On the other hand, their ability to provide experiences and respond to player choice makes them fundamentally different from other forms of visual or narrative culture. This post navigates between the two extremes, looking at the effect of a single, barbaric decision. Choosing rather or not to assault an interracial culture in the game's horrifically racist seting has, in Casey's analysis, at least two different effects. The game can convey "the idea that racism in its most insiduous form is less about villainy and more about institutionalized, systemic, and normalized violence." At the same time, it need not have this effect. Indeed, you as the gamer "are encouraged in your player experience to revel in the implied notion that enough bullets (or baseballs) will rid Columbia of wicked individuals and therefore of wicked ideologies." It is precisely this play between not just different interpretations but also different actions that makes video game narratives such rich and interesting cultural artifacts.

Tags:

Strong Female Character

Wrapping Up the Year

Deb Streusand — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 12:41:20 +0000

It’s almost the end of the year for viz.! Over the next few days, we’ll be wrapping up with each writer getting a chance to list and discuss their top five favorite posts from the past year. Here are mine.

Scott Garbacz on Guardians of the Galaxy: Scott’s analysis of images from the film gets at sci-fi’s ability to convey not merely excitement and adventure, but the beauty that can be found in the unfamiliar. He shows how the film creates a rhetoric of compassion in the midst of entertainment.

Aubri Plourde on childhood sexualization: our resident expert on childhood takes down the idea that sexualizing a young person like Miley Cyrus is anything new. Analyzing images of toddlers pictured as adults and the adult Madonna pictured as a child, she demonstrates that the phenomenon is both widespread and time-honored.

Emily Lederman on the Chipotle “Scarecrow” ad: Emily examines the holes in the messaging of Chipotle’s much-watched ad. She asks incisive questions about how friendly to the environment and to animals Chipotle’s food sourcing really is.

My post on a new cover for the Jungle Book: I like it when I get to get a little political on viz. In this case, I enjoyed getting to the root of the problems with the visual message conveyed by this children’s book cover.

My favorite post to work on this year was on the visual rhetoric of girly drinks and its relationship to heteronormativity. I examined the implications of calling particular types of drinks “girly” and what that convention says about conceptions of gender in modern American culture.

That’s it! Thank you for your readership this year and for exploring visual rhetoric with us.

Tags:

Visual Rhetoric

nostalgia

appreciation