viz. - theory

Press(ing) Matter

Sarah Orem — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: BBC News

Only a scant 23 days elapsed after TMZ leaked nude photos of Prince Harry that French tabloid Closer printed images of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless on the balcony of a Provence guesthouse. In addition to the frenzied speculation about the photos themselves (Is the queen upset with her grandson? Was Middleton truly in private, since she was photographed on a terrace? Are there more images that will emerge?) it’s interesting to note that the press itself has been the subject of equal amounts of scrutiny.

The issue of where these revealing pictures would be published quickly became one of the most discussed aspects of this story. While UK’s The Sun printed Prince Harry’s photos on its front page, the same tabloid refused to publish indiscreet images of Kate. The royal family has brought a lawsuit against Closer for a breach of privacy. And, CNN speculates that since TMZ ran Prince Harry’s images before any British newspaper, it might mean that 1) the American press effectively “scooped” their English counterparts and, 2) that digital media is outpacing print journalism. Though Prince Harry and the Duchess of Cambridge are – literally – on display in this controversy, the press has become just as visible as the royal family.

Image Credit: Reuters

Visual texts, such as paparazzi photos and newsstand images, have become the site for a global conversation about the our right to privacy (or publicity). Many journalists claim that Kate’s photos represent “an invasion of privacy,” since she and her husband were on a “remote property” when captured on film. Conversely, columnists have seized Prince Harry’s photos as evidence of his “wild ways,” deeming the young man irresponsible for allowing the images to surface publicly. Here, visual objects allow journalists to rhetorically construct the ethos of those represented in the images.

By employing the language of the public/private split, news writers unwittingly wade into a long-standing scholarly debate on the same subject. It’s curious (or very, very appropriate) to see Kate Middleton’s images associated with privacy (which was “brutal[ly]” invaded), while the visual documentation of Prince Harry’s partying has been labeled “indisputably in the public domain.” Public sphere theorist Michael Warner points out in Publics and Counterpublics (2005) that women have long been associated with the private sphere (the home, the family) while “masculinity, at least in Western cultures, is felt partly in a way of occupying public space” (24). Though both members of the royal family could have reasonably expected privacy while undressing – Kate at a friend’s home, Harry in a hotel suite – journalists locate the Duchess’s nudity in the private sphere, and the Prince’s in public.

Not only are the distinctions between public and private increasingly articulated in visual terminology, as I argue above, but they are also defined on and through the medium of the body. Feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz unpacks the many significations we commonly heap onto the body in Volatile Bodies (1994): embodiment often becomes the physical locus for distinctions between

reason and passion, sense and sensibility, outside and inside, self and other, depth and surface, reality and appearance, mechanism and vitalism, transcendence and immanence, temporality and spatiality, psychology and physiology, form and matter, and so on. (3)

It seems that royal bodies bear an especially hefty portion of the conceptual weight we assign to the flesh as matter. Both the Duchess Catherine and Prince Harry’s bodies have become the site for a global discussion about the public vs. the private.

These sovereign bodies have also been used to flesh out (pun intended) our contemporary attitudes towards sex. The press has criticized Prince Harry’s licentiousness and lauded Her Highness’ sense of family duty, and I speculate that the disparity between these two reactions has something to do with the context in which their bodies appear. Middleton’s photos locate her in the frame of a heterosexual, monogamous, married, relationship. Swirling pregnancy rumors also link her sexuality with procreation. Reporters implicitly assign her to what Gayle Rubin calls the “Charmed Circle” of “good, normal, natural” sex. Rubin outlines the differences between taboo and accepted sexual practices in her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex,” even providing a succinct chart to illustrate her argument.

Image Credit: University of Victoria

The press positions Prince Harry’s sexuality in Rubin’s “Outer Limits,” or, what dominant culture often deems “bad, abnormal, unnatural” sex. Since the images depict the young prince alongside several similarly unclothed women, media sources accuse him of participating in casual, promiscuous, and unmarried sex. His activities are seen as non-procreative and in a group, as opposed to within a relationship. Rubin’s writing might explain why journalistic rhetoric holds Prince Harry culpable for his own photos while exonerating the Duchess of Cambridge: his body is linked to non-normative sex, and hers isn’t.

Some tabloid websites, including The Hollywood Gossip, suggest that the leak of Harry’s photos “constitutes an epic failure on his handlers’ part.” The website argues that both Prince Harry and his “people” were “either clueless or careless” by not forcing the women with whom Harry was pictured to hand over their phones before the party began. This article implicitly raises the issue of control, blaming Harry for failing to reign in not only his own behavior, but the actions of those around him as well. This terminology of bodily control evokes the logic of Cartesian dualism, in which the activity of the mind gets contrasted with the inert body. The Cartesian theorization of the body typically reads corporeality in “naturalistic, organic, passive, inert terms, seeing it as an intrusion on or interference with the operation of the mind, a brute givenness which requires overcoming” (Grosz 3-4). Western philosophy typically construes the body as a blank slate onto which cultural norms get projected, or, as formless matter awaiting shape from the thinking mind.

Image Credit: PerezHilton.com

In being shocked by the prince’s lack of control, casting him as “careless,” the rhetoric of many journalists links up with the long-standing tradition of viewing the body as brute matter in need of discipline. Relying on and perpetuating the logics of Cartesian binarism, websites like The Hollywood Gossip condemn the prince because he refuses to “overcome” bodily excess. Because this rhetoric suggests the prince possesses an out-of-control corporeality, he is feminized. To return again to Grosz’s explication of Cartesianism, she points out that within the mind/body distinction, the “coupling of mind with maleness” leads to the association of “the body with femaleness” (4). Masculinity is graced with knowledge, thought, and enlightened rationalism, and femininity is bound to bodily excess. Unlike his sister-in-law, whose marital status the press seizes as an example of control and discipline (affording to her the privilege of masculinity’s “disavowal of the body”?), Prince Harry is constructed in feminine terminology by popular rhetoric (Grosz 4).

My final thoughts on this matter concern how the actions of the popular press affect even the most pedestrian, un-famous individuals (like you or me). The now ubiquitous claim that the press wronged Kate Middleton by invading her privacy has suggestive ramifications. By saying that photographers breached her privacy we imply that privacy is somehow sacred, or a space where an individual can exert control over their body. Does this association between privacy and autonomy correlate to the idea that publicity is not sacred? Put another way: if Middleton should have been protected under the guise of her privacy, would she not be protected in a public setting? I’ll admit, the question sounds a bit silly. But, I’d like to believe that even in public spaces we have the right to control our bodies, how they are represented, and what’s done to them. Personally, I would rather frame the issue in terms of consent: the widespread publication of these photos troubles me because neither Prince Harry nor the Duchess of Cambridge were given the opportunity to consent to the literally global display of their bodies.

"Maybe These Maps Are Legends": Ghost Signs and the Traces of the Past

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:00:40 +0000

Austin, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

There is nothing in heaven above, in the earth beneath, in the water, or in the air we breathe but will be found in the universal Language of the Walls. ("The Language of the Walls," anonymous, 1855).

Maps are propositions as well as indexes, making visual arguments about our orientation in this world--a good map (whether road or otherwise) gets us somewhere, forces us to reconsider the relationship between us and the world. Advertising, that pernicious beasat, is also somewhere between sign and proposition. A visual referent to a thing--a bottle of beer, a pack of gum, an insurance service--an advertisement also makes an argument or, at the very least, presents a fantasy of (self-)orientation. But what happens when those relationships are obscured, when the fantasy becomes outdated? What happens when the ad remains after the product is gone?

Image, John Orlando Parry, "A London Street Scene," 1835 from Wikimedia Commons

Advertising really becomes a science and a spectacle under the Victorians, who understood (and saw the signs of) the radically changing nature of capitalism. victorians pioneered advertising on the walls, as the sardonically frustrated narrator of "The Language of the Walls" notes. Advertising thus became a kind of "commodification of public space", as Sam Roberts and Sebastian Groes call it; an intrusion that we now take for granted began as a visual index of the transformation of public culture.

Galveston, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

The marks of this early advertising culture are all around us today, sometimes revealed--as in this photo--by the restructurations of late capitalism. As the photographer notes, this ghost sign only became visible after a local business had been pulled down. Ghost signs, then, function as both advertisement and map, indexing a previously obscured spatial relationship to the past. Often overlooked or unobserved, ghost signs write out--visually signify--a complex map of urban histories.

Galveston, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

Multiple businesses can be encoded onto each other. Like a palimpsest, ghost signs narrate the derridean traces ("the mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present") of history (local, cultural, capital) in physical form. They are inscrutable maps as well as unobtainable fantasies; as such, they represent almost pure representation (italicize), as it were, as they now exist without a goal or purpose, "signifying nothing."

Baltimore, MD, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

Real World Metropolis, Future City on Film: “Almost the Same, But Not Quite” Tokyo in Solaris

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

I just watched Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. The movie’s a whirlwind of mourning, longing, and technologizing. I won’t talk much about the plot here. Instead, I’ll talk about a scene, amongst many, that caught my attention. This scene, in the distant, fuzzy future of the movie’s setting, places us in the passenger seat of a self-propelled car on an impossibly busy highway. In Tokyo, Japan. In 1971. Like Solaris, many TV shows and movies have made use of present-day, real world metropolises to conjure up imagined future cities. In this first segment of a series called “Real World Metropolis, Future City on Film,” Tokyo in Solaris is “almost the same, but not quite” what we’re used to seeing.

In a scene that runs upwards of four minutes, Tarkovsky captures a “future” city where cars weave through fast-moving traffic along a multilane/multilevel highway. Tall buildings with dazzling billboards and glittering neon signs scroll alongside our moving vehicle. Eerie electronic notes punctuate a mostly silent drive. This scene might sound commonplace, especially for those of us familiar with the highways of Texas and California.

Los Angeles Freeway Interchange Image Credit: Stock Connection/World of Stock

But in the context of the film, it’s an unsettling drive through a future city (though the scene was filmed on Tokyo’s highways). According to the audio commentary on the Criterion Collection edition of Solaris, film critics Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie claim that Tarkovsky expressly asked for permission from the USSR to film in Japan. Although Tarkovsky’s original goal was to film the World’s Fair in Osaka (held in 1970), he was granted permission to leave for Japan in 1971 and ended up filming everyday traffic in Tokyo instead. Some critics (namely the New York Times’ Dan Kois) call the scene “the most boring” in the entire movie. Yet, to me, the scene feels anything but unnecessary and ordinary when taken in context. Even while watching the movie in the Austin of 2011, I was struck by how unsettled the scene made me feel. The extra-long takes, the startling electronic sounds, the unexpected cuts between color and black-and-white film all disoriented me.

Image credit: Screenshot from Solaris scene

I keep thinking that this scene is—per Homi Bhabha’s concept of “mimicry”—“almost the same, but not quite” the same as the highways I’m familiar with. And, I don’t think so just because I’m not used to seeing Japanese characters during interstate drives. Akira Kurosawa reads the scene with a “shudder.” To Kurosawa, “By a skillful use of mirrors, [Tarkovsky] turned flows of head lights and tail lamps of cars, multiplied and amplified, into a vintage image of the future city.” Given that the film’s protagonist, Kris Kelvin, uncannily finds someone (or something) rather like his dead wife, Hari, on Solaris, the theme of mimicry is Tarkovsky’s signature move for disorientation. Being thrown off kilter when we see Tokyo and Hari is exactly the point.

Echotone: A Portrait of the Genre-Crossing Documentary Through Its Panoptic and Street-Level Lenses

Lisa Gulesserian — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:40:14 +0000

Image credit: Screenshot, Echotone trailer on YouTube

Hello, viz. readers! I’m Lisa, and I’m new to the blog. You’ll notice as you read my posts that I’ve got my favorite themes: cities and urban culture, genre-crossing productions (of the filmic and literary variety), and the global south.

My post today, on last year’s documentary film Echotone, concerns two of my three interests—I’ll leave it to you to figure out which of my interests apply.

The movie, made in 2010 by director Nathan Christ, is a self-described “cultural portrait of the modern American city examined through the lyrics and lens of its creative class.” Our fine blog’s hometown, Austin, Texas, is the American city under scrutiny in the film.

Throughout Echotone, the viewer is transported to staggering heights above the city. In fact, the opening shot pans across the skyline, documenting construction projects that dot the landscape of downtown Austin. Tethered to a crane, the camera sees the city in a panoptic—some might say voyeuristic, especially because of the evening/early morning light—way. With soft shadows and glimmering waters, there’s a beauty in seeing the city from above, removed from its day-to-day scuffles and scraps.

Image credit: Screenshot, Echotone trailer on YouTube

In truth, French theorist Michel de Certeau reminds us of this scopic pleasure in his famous chapter of The Practice of Everyday Life entitled “Walking in the City”: being atop the city’s highest structure and looking down at its beautiful totality transforms the mundane city into “a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a God.” When we can contain the totality of the city in one image, one visage, we are empowered.

So, then, why would we leave such great heights (for, of course, Echotone must move to documenting what happens in the streets, the bars, the garages of Austin to get to the heart of the city’s “creative class”)? Why, per de Certeau, should we “fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth”? Let’s follow de Certeau into the darkness: “The panorama-city is a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.” No overhead view of the city will show us its stories, its intricacies, its residents. So, we descend the heights (as we do in all movies about cities) into the murky streets and alleyways of the complex city.

Image credit: Screenshot, Echotone trailer on YouTube

And we do so with Echotone—we see a kitchen full of mattresses while an indie pop band records an album, we see a garage full of unsold CDs while the film’s producer explains why he promotes bands (it’s for the love of music), and we see a street full of tired and wired music-lovers during the city’s annual South by Southwest music festival. We see all these things in Echotone because a movie about a city can never be filmed only from on high.

The question is, why does Echotone switch between panoptic and street-level views as the movie progresses? We see everything on the ground through the “lens of [the city’s] creative class,” along with panning shots of the city from above, because Echotone is a tricky kind of movie. Part documentary, part moralizing tale about the problems that musicians face in the self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World,” the film moves between the panoptic view of the city’s developers and the familiar views of its hardworking musicians. Like de Certeau’s pedestrian in the city that moves such that no panoptic power can know exactly what they’re doing at any given moment, the film strives to shake up our notions of the idyllic “music capital” by disorienting us with hypnotic sequences of the city from above. Of course, we know from the emotional value invested in the scenes with Austin bands (like Belaire who worry about “selling out,” like Sunset who worry about selling out again, and like Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears who worry about being “broke”) where the true loyalties of the film lie—in the streets with Austin’s musicians.

To see the city of Austin in a movie theater near you through both panoptic and street-level lenses, visit Echotone’s “Events” page.

The Theory and Pedagogy of viz.: Reflections on the 2010-2011 Academic Year

ladysquires — Wed, 04 May 2011 18:39:28 +0000

As the year closes, we're reflecting on the ways our posts have connected visual rhetoric, digital literacy, and pedagogy. We've presented lesson plans that use programs like Animoto, iMovie, Sound Slides Plus, Xtranormal, etc. There are longer posts that detail how these programs were used available on the blog, but in the first part of this post, Elizabeth will focus on those that present ideas for using iMovie in the classroom. In the second part of the post, Ashley will explore one of the broad themes our posts this year have addressed and talk about the ways in which we are theorizing the connections between embodiment and pedagogy.

Elizabeth: In Megan Eatman's RHE 309k: The Rhetoric of Tragedy students used, among other media, iMovie to make visual arguments in the form of narrated slideshows. In one of two posts detailing how she used iMovie in the classroom, Megan wrote The use of images often plays a large part in determining whether something registers as "tragic" in public discourse, so constructing visual arguments allowed students to build on their participation in extant conversations through engaging with the visual rhetoric already surrounding their event." Students were given time to experiment with iMovie during class and were not required to use images related to their topics while learning the program. This created a low-stakes atmosphere in which they could learn the program comfortably. Megan also constructed her own video as a model that could be shown to students. Students then had the option of using iMovie as well as other programs such as Photoshop to create multimodal arguments.

Here is the model Megan created and a link to her lesson plan:

I also began to think about how iMovie could be used in the classroom. I noticed that I was writing a lot of posts about how images and digital media were being used to enhance online experiences of poetry and bring poetry to new audiences. In particular, I was taken with this piece by poet and scholar and UT alum Susan Somers-Willett in which she worked with a photographer to create a series of docu-poems. (Sidenote: there will be an interview with Susan available on our “Views” page.)

In Verse: Women of Troy from InVerse on Vimeo.

I wanted to create an exercise that would allow students to think about documenting their own engagement with poems of their choosing. Creating iMovie files that include their reading of poems they interpret critically allows for a visual record of that interpretation and a public performance that goes beyond rote memorization.

Ashley: This marks the first year of aggressively using Google Analytics to track activity on the blog, and the data that we have gathered shows not only a growing audience for viz. but offers us a better sense of what readers are responding to. Posts that dealt with various representations of the body tended to be the most popular for all of the reasons you can imagine, but as we marked that trend, we talked about using those responses to shape a socially responsible and relevent set of posts on the theme of embodiment. These posts point to the ways in which bodies and representations of bodies function as a powerful form of visual rhetoric in our culture, and that importance has significant pedagogical implications. Our students operate in an image saturated world in which bodies are constantly circulating, so understanding how image producers and image subjects engage with their intended audience is an important part of building visual literacy.

Megan's post on American Apparel advertisements and Mike's post on the use of pornographic images in PETA ads focused on sexualization and exploitation. Both posts point to the ways in which the use of stereotypical, oversexed images may actually work against the rhetorical purposes of their creators. As Mike says of a PETA campaign that visually links nude women to animals and/or cuts of meat, "The message these images convey is simple: women are sexy animals. I suppose PETA wants us to treat animals with as much respect as we, as a society, treat women. Since, however, PETA seems perfectly fine with the sexual objectification of women and the insistence that they always be beautiful and naked, their message becomes incoherent."

As a counterpoint to those posts, I explored the work of two photographers who use nudes or partial nudes in very different ways. The first was Howard Schwartz and Beverly Ornstein's The Athelete, which uses images of male and female Olympic athletes to make a point about the variety of bodies that excel at particular kinds of physical activity, broadening our idea of what a fit, healthy, or athletic body looks like. Later in the semester, I had the opportunity to interview award-winning New York-based photographer Substantia Jones, who photographs nude or partially nude men and women who self identify as "fat" as part of her Adipositivity Project. Jones's project is explicitly political. She aims to challenge our notions of what constitutes a normal or even healthy body by depicting subjects whose bodies are typically either inivisible or vilified in the media and celebrating thier physicality.

The interview provided powerful insights into the ways in which a photographer can engage with her subjects in a way that celebrates rather than exploits their bodies. All of Jones's models are amateurs, many of whom approach her about participating in the project. Jones talked about how she establishes a rapport with a photographic subject who is obviously placing him or herself in a very vulnerable position: "By the time someone contacts me and asks to be an Adiposer, I presume they've already done all the "Can I really drop trou for a stranger's camera?" work. Many lose their nerve during the scheduling phase (far preferable to losing their nerve during the me-ringing-their-doorbell phase, which has happened). But I think when (and if) they open the door, they see a smiling fellow fatty--a comrade--who wants the experience to be good for all involved. What we're doing is indeed ridiculous, so we usually laugh at lot. That helps. As does a cocktail."

This interview brought over 1500 unique visitors to our site in the first 24 hours, and the posts mentioned above have been among the most popular blog entries of the entire semester. Naturally, that raises questions about how we ought to use NSFW (Not Safe for Work) or pornographic content on the blog and in the classroom. Obviously, we would be irresponsible to present such images merely for the sake of titillation or provocation, but the widespread circulation of these images speaks to a greater need for dialogue both with the public and with students about the effectiveness and responsibility of using bodies to make arguments.

New Theory Page: Visual Literacy and Solidarity

fc — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:38:58 +0000

Image Credit: AmericanTeenMovie.com

I recently posted a new page on "Visual Literacy and Solidarity" to the "Theory" section of VIZ. It passes back over some of the material from my posts this semester on food, food culture and food policy, but I also couldn't resist encroaching on Rachel's pop-culture territory with a few references to The Breakfast Club and Kanye West (to be fair, though, the movie is named after the most important meal of the day).

My main goal was to illustrate that no one is "literate" in general, that visual literacy (or cultural literacy, etc.) does not exist in a vacuum. Literacy implies a set of skills and a range of knowledge, and, since the criteria for assessing literacy are set by particular groups of people in particular times and places, demonstrating literacy is often a substantial claim of solidarity, a performative presentation of evidence that we belong to the group because we "know our stuff." Such a performance can, in turn, be a powerful rhetorical tool: instant ethos, just add water.

So, if you know why the picture at the top of this post is funny, then you're one of the cool kids. If not, you could click over and read the theory post, or (if you're one of the smart kids) you can probably figure it out with the picture below.

Image Credit: IMDB.com

And remember to eat a good breakfast, for your mother's sake (Mother's Day is Sunday, May 9).

Image Credit: Flickr.com

Delivery in the Rhetorical Classroom

Rachel Schneider — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:29:55 +0000

By Rachel Schneider

One of the five major canons, delivery has often occupied an instable place in rhetoric. Aristotle dismissed delivery as being relatively unimportant to rhetoric, and with the exception of the eighteenth-century elocutionary movement, delivery has been readily ignored or imagined to be a subject for communications professors. Within the contemporary rhetoric classroom, where most of the work examined is written communication, delivery remains outside of the purview of most discussions. However, as visual rhetoric often involves video as frequently as it does static images, delivery may become a more important factor in rhetorical pedagogy—not as we teach students to deliver speeches, but as we teach them to analyze texts that are audiovisual.

What makes this more complicated is that these audiovisual texts are often not speeches—they are performed texts. A class on the rhetoric of luxury might as easily focus on an episode of Gossip Girl as it might an ad for Aston Martin cars; thus, a vocabulary of delivery needs to learn to take into account performance not just in Burke’s or Austin’s terms, but to think about how an actor’s performance attempts to convey arguments through establishing sympathetic characters. This requires more than a language of pronunciation, volume, and gesture, but rethinking how we analyze performances as rhetorical texts. Teaching students to read these texts, and giving them a vocabulary for articulating what they find there, will help them learn to think critically about all forms of popular media that they might encounter.

However, trying to teach students to think about analyzing delivery in performed material involves a wide range of material. Just as Margaret Syverson encourages teachers to think of composition as consisting of an ecology or “a set of interrelated and interdependent complex systems” (3), so performance itself evolves as part of a set of systems—actors working together, performing on a stage as they are watched by an audience who participate in the performance through applause or boos, all of which takes place within a larger theater. Just as the writer’s labor does not take place in isolation, performance is dependent upon location, time, the director’s guidance, and a host of larger contexts that have to be considered. While we might look backward to the elocutionists for a terminology, modern communications studies and performance studies also offer help in thinking of ways to revive delivery for the modern rhetoric classroom.

In his book on performance theory, Richard Schechner stresses the need to study each performance on a case by case basis: “[A]s embodied practices each and every performance is specific and different from every other. The differences enact the conventions and traditions of a genre, the personal choices made by the performers, various cultural patterns, historical circumstances, and the particularities of reception” (29). In my own class, The Rhetoric of the Musical, we’ve spent the semester considering how the musical (a highly stylized genre) creates and frequently violates its own conventions, how it balances the demands of believability and naturalness that is the greater concern of twentieth-century acting with its own unnatural convention of people breaking out into song at emotional moments. However, Schechner’s observation is perfectly suited to rhetorical terms: each rhetorical performance is already examined within its own particular context, and the rooted concerns of speaker, audience, and text. Just so any analysis of a performative text requires a sensitivity to the intent of gestures and vocal performance, and how each are calculated to construct characters that attempt to engage the audience’s sympathies to persuade them not only to watch the musical, but also to engage on their side in the controversies of the plot. Bruce Kirle’s article on “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of Oklahoma! in American Consciousness” excellently studies Joseph Buloff’s performance in the original 1943 Broadway production, and how he signals a Jewishness that is acceptable to audiences, and thus reconciles them to World War II interventionist military policies. His work shows the potential benefits for thinking about delivery.

While elsewhere on this site I provide my own lesson plans as a guide, I want here to include a list of materials that I’ve consulted in creating a language of delivery for my students, as well as modern rhetorical books that think about the place of delivery in the rhetorical canon. I hope this material might be helpful for thinking about potential applications and ways to adapt delivery into the modern rhetorical classroom as a method for analysis.

Works Cited and Related Sources

Buchanan, Lindal. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

Golden, James L., Goodwin F. Berquist, William E. Coleman, and J. Michael Sproule. The Rhetoric of Western Thought: From the Mediterranean World to the Global Setting. Eighth edition. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 2003.

Kirle, Bruce. “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of Oklahoma! in American Consciousness.” Theatre Journal 55 (2003): 251-274.

McCutcheon, Randall, James Schaffer, and Joseph R. Wycoff. Communication Applications. Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company, 2001.

Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Second edition. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Stucky, Nathan and Cynthia Wimmer, eds. Teaching Performance Studies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

Syverson, Margaret A. The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.

Wolf, Laurie and Counsell, Colin. Performance Analysis: An Introductory Coursebook. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2001.

Wolf, Stacy. “In Defense of Pleasure: Musical Theatre History in the Liberal Arts [A Manifesto].” Theatre Topics 17.1 (2007): 51-60.

Wolf, Stacy. Handouts from TD357T “American Musical Theatre History” Spring 2008 at the University of Texas at Austin.

Text or Image, why must we favor one over the other?

LaurenMitchell — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:00:32 +0000

I just saw a talk given by Katherine Hayles here at UT. Hayles is arguing that literary criticism is missing something when it ignores the material aspects of a text. She calls for a new form of literary criticism that she terms media-specific analysis. This form of criticism views the material aspects of a text as contributing as much to the meaning of a text as the text itself. She showed two examples of electronic texts that make visual arguments at the same time that they make textual arguments.

One was Lexia to Perplexia by Talan Memmott. This text takes control away from the reader by using text that disappears suddenly, text that becomes unreadable when you roll the mouse over it. Essentially, the movement of the mouse can unexpectedly change what is on the screen. The words and images are fused in this text. The create significance together because the words are part of the images.
The other text that Hayles showed during her talk was Nippon by Young-Hae Chang. Nippon uses moving text and music at the same time. Half the screen is red with white English words and half white with red Japanese characters. The words and characters move at a readable pace and then too fast to be read. It alternates between the two. The size of the letters also changes as well as the method by which they appear on the page. The text is also synchronized with the music. So this text has audio, visual, and textual characteristics which contribute to its meaning.
These two texts are examples of a fusion of visual and textual rhetoric. One is not subordinate to the other in the way that captions are to images, or images serve merely as examples of what is being discussed in a text.

New theory article on viz.!

John Jones — Fri, 11 May 2007 11:51:04 +0000

We’ve posted a new article in the theory section of the site. “Ekphrasis: Image and Text” outlines the discussion surrounding the use of ekphrasis and relates that history to the interconnection of images and text. Enjoy!

Baudrillard dies at 77

John Jones — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:27:45 +0000

The French theorist Jean Baudrillard died this week. As this obituary from the BBC notes, Baudrillard was well known for his post-modernist theory and controversial statements.

His work is important to visual studies for his theory of the spectacle, which, the article points out, he argued “is crucial in creating our view of events--things do not happen if they are not seen.” You can read his article “Simulacra and Simulations” by following this link, which is referenced through the site’s bibliography. Or, if you are just interested in how his work relates to The Matrix, you can read this Wikipedia article.

Image as argument

John Jones — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 17:46:16 +0000

By John Jones

source: Wikimedia CommonsThe title page of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan

The arguments found in images are related to textual arguments in that each is presented through the selection and arrangement of disparate elements for some purpose. Though those purposes can range from persuasion to aesthetic pleasure, the fact that they are purposive places them in the realm of rhetoric.

Though photographs and realistic painting are arguments by this definition—they are composed, in that the image’s angle is chosen by the painter or cropped by the photographer and the composition and elements present in each are determined by their authors—this argumentative purpose is more apparent in other media, like collage, or double-exposure photographs, for these methods emphasize their own composed structure through the arrangement of the disparate or fantastical elements that they consist of.

Another category of visual argument is that of the "visual confection." In Visual Explanations (1997) Edward Tufte argues that the confection is different from the examples listed above—photos, collage, etc.—in that confections are fantastical visual structures designed to illustrate written arguments. In this description, diagrams, flowcharts, and iconic images that are created to specifically support written arguments can be called visual confections. One example of a confection is the title page from Thomas Hobbes‘ Leviathan. Tufte argues that this image, which is arranged to illustrate the argument of the book, fits the category because it is explicitly connected to the author’s textual arguments.