viz. - rhetoric

Generic Branding and our Culture's Values

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 13:00:00 +0000

Branding and corporate marketing can be bizarre. Sure, there are the big brands, the Disney’s or Budweisers or Coca-Colas, whose very names evoke our day-to-day experience of the products they market. For those of us who like to think about how visual rhetoric interacts with pop culture, these iconic multinationals can provide endless streams of data. Watching how such companies endlessly race to reflect or mold global and American cultures so as to increase visibility may sometimes be a depressing project, but it is always fascinating. But what about the guys who we don’t interact with on a daily basis?

I’ve never had an opportunity to purchase anything advertising itself as a British Petroleum product, yet I’ve been saturated with billboards and advertisements seeking to win my good-will for the company. Similarly, I grew up watching striking ad after striking ad for the chemical company BASF, even though their tagline explicitly reminded me that “we don’t make a lot of the products you buy.” I will probably never make any purchasing decision that affects BASF’s bottom-line, yet they seem to have been quite passionate about convincing me that “we make a lot of the products you buy better.”

Companies whose work only indirectly affect our lives find themselves in a rather comical rhetorical situation. How can you attract a following as large as possible, made up of people who don’t know what you do, without offending anyone in the process? The answer, at least according to Kendra Eash’s satirical poem, is to throw a bunch of incoherent yet iconic images together, targeting as many different audiences as possible, while always remembering the importance of committing to nothing. “We think first,” Eash’s poem begins, “of vague words that are synonyms for progress / And pair them with footage of a high-speed train.” Her description of the video passes through a sea of carefully calculated images and ends with inanity. “Did we put a baby in here?” she asks. “What about an ethinic old man whose wrinkled smile represents / the happiness and wisdom of the poor? / Yep.” If a corporation has nothing to sell you directly, there’s always the old standby: instead of selling a product, sell people back their own cliches.

The poem took an interesting turn when read by someone at Dissolve, a company that provides stock footage. Since Dissolve already had vivid film clips to match each of Eash’s described scenes, they stitched them together to create the ultimate, and ultimately generic, brand video. It’s worth a watch. It maps, in vivid detail, the moral and aesthetic universe advertisers imagine when trying to attract mass-media viewers to their cause.

Image source: Dissolve.com

The website upon which Dissolve posted the piece adds two layers of irony to the whole experience. On the right, the makers praise Eash’s article and inform the reader that “we knew it was our moral imperative to make that generic brand video so. No surprise, we had all the footage.” Why Dissolve might feel a Categorical Imperative to mock one of its prime markets is, of course, left humorously vague. Less vague, of course, is the icons that take up the bottom of the screen: every clip from the trailer, conveniently laid out in rows, waiting for the filmmaker willing to invest $50 per short HD clip of emotional manipulation.

“Memeing” Silence—the Gif and Silent Film, Part 2

Laura Thain — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:58:53 +0000

Image Credit: Deeras23

In my previous post, I outlined DeCordova’s arguments about the emergence of a discourse on acting in the early 20^th century, and the contributions that discourse made to modern conceptions of celebrity, beginning in silent film. In this post, I’d like to translate those arguments into a discussion of 21^st century media and attempt to outline a discourse on “gifing,” and what that can tell us about the intersections of gifs and celebrity in the 21^st century public sphere.

I ended my post with the suggestion that the embedded “meme” or mimetic function of gifing was the essential element of gifing as a medium that allows for a conception of gif celebrity. Here, I’d like to explore the early stages of that celebrity in the predecessor to the gif: the “meme” itself.

Early this year, Business Insider published a puff piece of “What 6 Viral Internet Meme Stars Look Like in Real Life.” Most of this content was pulled from the popular internet archive Know Your Meme, which more fully documents who ascertained the true identities of these “meme stars,” and how. (A large portion of the investigative activity took place on the message boards of the popular social news and entertainment site Reddit, which has been much discussed as a source of controversial tactical media.)

Image Source: Know Your Meme

Image Credit: Know Your Meme

The public’s interest in the real identity behind these “meme stars” has two important implications in the rhetoric of the meme. First, it privileges the “real” or “authentic” person behind the meme as the ultimate site of authenticity by identifying it as the meme’s point of origin. (This is the implicit reason archives like “Know Your Meme” seem interested in the “real” image of the speaker in the meme—it is the point of origin from which all “memeing” springs.) This particular privileging of the authentic persona of the meme star as the site of authenticity signals a shift from meme “fame” to meme “celebrity”—much as DeCordova describes in early 20^th century film.

Second, this interest in attaching the meme to an “original” speaker gives us a way to tie the discourse on “memeing” to linguistic and rhetorical conceptions of the “utterance” as a basic linguistic unit. As I’ve previously discussed, the meme is a unit of cultural transference, usually in the form of a compressed emotion or attitude. We can understand this in terms of “utterance” as a theoretical term beginning with Saussure, who defined the utterance as the most basic unit of signifying, and thus, the most basic unit of language.

But Saussure’s conception of the utterance gives us a very particular way to consider context, and therefore intertextuality, as a network of social convention in which the identification of a point of origin, no matter how artificial, is of no use. By Saussure’s structuralist approach, the signified is an abstract, intangible object; we can approach, but never reach it, by examining its signifiers. Because the utterance is the most basic form of communication, to break it down further would be to enter the realm of pure language, which only exists in abstracts. (In short, it’s just turtles all the way down.)

Bahktin, however, considers the utterance to have a dialogic quality—utterances are by nature responses to previous utterances. An utterance, then, can be broken down and linked to a previous utterance. As Bahktin argues, utterances cannot be “self-sufficient,” and they rely on intertextuality (what Baktin calls “the dialogic”) in order to render meaning. In “Speech Genres,” he affirms

The very boundaries of the utterance are determined by a change of speech subjects… Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account.

If we consider a meme a type of utterance, Bakhtin’s account of the function of the utterance helps us to understand why the discourse on memeing is so invested in identifying a point of origin of a meme’s unit of speech. Audiences are compelled to attach the utterance to a speaker when faced when an intertextual network of constantly shifting meaning attached to a single object (the meme); by identifying the original “speaker,” each variation of the meme attempts to counter the uncertainty of speech and assert the power over their own reading of the significance of the utterance vis a vis the “first” utterance. By this means, meme “stars” become meme “celebrities.”

But gifs function as memes too, although they draw from pre-established sites of celebrity as often as they create celebrity by means of repetition. And while the meme offers meaning by swapping out a distinctive white block text, the gif either appears without text at all, allowing gestures to function as utterances (as is the case of the archive RealityTVgifs) or is attached to a text related to personal experience (in tumblrs like OfficeHoursAreOver, WhatShouldWeCallMe, AllMyFriendsAreMarried, etc.).

Perhaps the reason gifs tend to rely on pre-established celebrity more often than they create fame from scratch is because the lack of text and the emphasis on gesture makes assigning the utterance to a speaker all the more crucial to the gif’s memetic function. However, as any gif proliferates, its intertextual dialogue creates a space that is distinct from, and often nearly independent of, the gif’s original context (usually, a scene in a television show or movie). The origin of the utterance becomes as inconsequential to the gif’s meaning as the meme’s “actual” identity—it becomes a site of authenticity only as much speakers recall it to establish their own ethos. However, as I’ve pointed out earlier, knowledge of the meme’s origin is often inconsequential to understanding or proliferating it.

Ultimately, the “origin” of the gif—its original context—becomes the site of authenticity in gif celebrity much as the personal, private life of a movie star is the site of authenticity in film celebrity. It stands in as legitimate, original context that presents itself as objective or “real,” but is just as available for response and reinvention as the gif itself (that is, that the gifs context is still a subjective category). This layering is ultimately a result of gif’s reinvention of older media forms and its marriage with a distinctly new media characteristic. Thus, examining the relationship between gif celebrity and early film celebrity demonstrates productive points of intersection, but the divergence of these intersections is crucial to understanding the gif as a mechanism of new media and Web 2.0.

Rhetorical Collusion

james.wiedner — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:35:25 +0000

Image Credit: Screencapture of graph created by the Collusion for Mozilla add-in.

I'd speculate that every instructor is familiar with the feeling that comes with anticipation and apprehension battling each other out before the first day of the semester. Maybe I'm just too easily flustered, but the prospect of standing up in front of a group of heretofore-unknown students, while pretending to be the infallible instructor of heretofore-unknown material always rattles my cage a bit.

Of the two aforementioned fears, the latter is always more menacing than the former for me (to the extent that you can actually separate them). This being the case, I was thrilled to find out before the start of the Fall 2012 semester (my first semester as a PhD student and as a UT Associate Instructor) that the book I would be engaging with my introductory rhetoric students was Eli Pariser's "The Filter Bubble."

The reason that this was such good news for me was that I had already read the book earlier in the summer for "fun." And this was no superficial reading, either; my paranoia and indignation over the sort(s) of information gathering and content filtering taking place on the Internet had led me to copiously annotate the book throughout. For the first time in my life, there was the distinct possibility that being a cynical alarmist would work to my advantage!

What's more, I was certain my students would be every bit as enthusiastic about the subject matter as I was. Hell, I thought to myself, they'll be far more knoweledgable in these areas than I am! I had better bone up on both the technical and cultural state of online affairs, 'lest their suspicions that their rhetoric instructor was a total douchemobile become certainties.

However, I soon found that, despite (or perhaps because of) their total immersion in the technology that drives our day-to-day lives, I knew more than they did with respect to the "ins-and-outs" of our digital lives. This was a dubious discovery: it meant that I didn't have to worry as much about sounding like a clueless Luddite on par with their parents, but I would have to really work to get them involved in the course materials.

But we forged ahead. There were times when I'd see signs of life, usually at those points in lecturing wherein I'd inadvertently get so worked up talking about these issues about which I was so emphatic, that they took my paranoia for passion, and there eyes would follow my flailing arms with what looked like rapt attention.

By week 3, however, I realized that I wasn't the impassioned, young, mind-opening instructor that I had fancied myself. Rather, I was the neurotic, old (yes, when you're 18, 34 is old) instructor that really needed to get a life if he was this excited about online marketing tactics. It was high time that I employ the incredibly advanced equipment in the classroom I was given to teach in by the DWRL.

I showed them a TED Talk given by Eli Pariser on the very subject he engages in his book:

They took in more during the first 5 minutes of Pariser's talk than they did the first chapters of his book. I don't mean this as any sort of criticism of Pariser's writing. To the contrary, the speech served as the spark that got my students to reallyread his book; seeing an actual person has added a face to the pages. The book transfomed from textbook to extended blog. They were now reading, digesting, and synthesizing the course materials, as was evidenced by the next essays they submitted.

Still, I could tell that they were looking at this whole thing in a "this is interesting, but they're not actually tracking me" sort of way. For them, "The Filter Bubble" was eye-opening, but they still weren't grasping the full extent of what this book was telling us. They weren't thinking about what it meant for a company to go past the anonymous tracking, to a point where somebody out their knew your name, address, hobbies, names of relatives, etc.

Wanted terribly to get them to that next step, I put together a lesson plan that was going to be multimedia in nature. I began with another TED Talk. This one was by Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, who was unveiling a new Firefox add-on called "Collusion,"

Collusion was created by Atul Varma, who says that it was reading "The Filter Bubble" that inspired him to crerate the program. Collusion examines some of the websites that silently track visitors long after they've left a site. More unsettling, Kovac's visual representation revealed the groups collecting information and following their every move around the Internet were sites that they'd never even visited.

I encouraged them to download the Collusion add-on and see what they found. We all took a screen shot of our "Collusion charts" at the end of a typical day of Internet usage (my chart is at the top of this post; to be fair, my chart represents heavier Internet usage than typical), and posted them on the course wiki. As I did not wanted to be yet another authority forcing them to divulge personal information, this assignment was 100% optional, and they had the option to submit anonymously, if they so desired.

The chart illustrating the extent of sites gathering my information without my knowledge (much less consent) wouldn't completely fit onto my screen. Hence, they aren't completely depicted on the screen capture above, which is unfortunate, because one of the most unsettling aspects of these charts is the visualization of the extent to which the web sites collecting my data were several steps removed from any site I ever visited...and they were sharing with sites even further removed from any online activity I personally engaged in.

With the Collusion charts, students saw all-too-clearly what they had previously understood only in the abstract. So long as it remained an abstract notion, it was never going to inspire a feeling of having a vested interest in these practices. Now that they'd seen what was going on, they were mad as hell, and were sufficiently knowledgeable that they could articulate the reasons behind their opinions effectively.

However, after a day or two of almost managing to convince myself that it was my vast knowledge and dynamic classroom persona that had made the course materials "real" for my students, I finally embraced the fact that the kudos would be more appropriately directed toward the videos and interactive add-ons that we had incorporated into our class time.

(As an aside, I felt compelled to temper their newfound disdain for the entities engaged in the practices exposed in "The Filter Bubble" with editorials defending those practices. I (hopefully) conveyed to my class that there are always multiple sides to any issue, and that the ability to argue one's opponent's case was the hallmark of a skilled rhetorician.)

Rhetological Bingo, or, More Attempts at Teaching Fallacies to Bored Freshmen

james.wiedner — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:02:56 +0000

Image source: Dinosaur Comics

The bulk of my last posting was spent singing the praises of Mr. David McCandless; as anyone who has checked out any of his work before or since then can attest to, such accolades are/were more than justified.

Specifically, I loved his “rhetological” fallacies project, where he vizualized a colorful list of about 50 different rhetorical or logical fallacies, and created an unadorned yet arresting image to accompany each of them. Pretty cool stuff.

McCandless and his team from his amazing site, imformationisbeautiful.net, then demonstrated an exercise they called “rhetological bingo,” wherein he and his cohort listened to a politically charged speech, and identified each of the fallacies they spotted on the way by adding one of the colorful images to a layout that they described as a “matrix.” Visitors to the site are encouraged to download a high-res copy of the game to play themselves. Even cooler stuff, right?

As I finished writing the aforementioned blog, I thought to myself, “’rhetological bingo,’ why can’t I be that clever? You know what else would be really cool? If, instead of a matrix, rhetological bingo involved vizualized bingo cards? I could play a political speech/cartoon from You Tube on the big screen in the classroom, while all of my students, at their individual computers (or maybe in pairs) checked off rhetorical and logical fallacies as they spotted them on their respective bingo cards (Flash-powered, maybe?), until the inevitable ‘Bingo?!' At which point, the winning student(s) would run through their answers, explaining to all of us the portion of the speech that they thought constitued a fallacy?! Yes! That’d be awesome, and I totally rock for coming up with this totally new way to use these illustrations! Goddamn am I awesome!”

Then I googled “rhetological bingo” and scanned a few results down…

After a lifetime of coming up with great new ideas only to discover that they aren’t so new after all, you’d think I’d be used to the dejection that accompanies such discoveries, and that I’d cope accordingly. Nonetheless, this one took a little wind out of my sails:

Image credit: Graceavery Rhetological Bingo

Grace Avery has created a fantastic rhetological bingo platform, even better than the one I’d envisioned, utilizing the images and definitions from the McCandless project. Every bingo card comes up with different fallacy names and corresponding images in different orders; hovering over any of the images on any of squares causes a definition and example of the corresponding concept to pop up in an oh-so-engaging way!

My only criticism of this mashup would be that the attribution provided isn’t really as clear as it could be. A link to informationisbeautiful.com at the corner of the bingo card (see above) is the extent of her attribution (note that even that link only takes to you the site's homepage, where it's far from apparent that the rhetological fallacies project resides there). if I’d stumbled across Ms. Kelly’s game without prior knowledge of the original rhetological fallacies project, I would have assumed that the images and definitions were her own. Looking at her site in its totality, it's hard to give her the benefit of the doubt on this one. But what do I know? Nothing, except that I am going to be able to parlay this into part of a kick-ass lesson plan…with all due attributions, of course. ;)

Rhetological is SO a word!

james.wiedner — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 23:14:02 +0000

Image Credit: Rhetological Fallacies

As an instructor teaching an introductory rhetoric course, I sympathize with my students, I truly do. I don’t mean this in some sort of self-effacing “so sad for them, they lost the instructor lottery, I suck.” To the contrary, when one considers the fact that I have to engage 18-year-olds at 9:30 in the morning on matters as dry as the differences between Aristotelian and Platonic notions concerning rhetoric, and/or the finer points of JSTOR navigation, I’d say that I do a halfway decent job.

However, “halfway decent” frequently falls short for my early-morning audience. Hell, I could be a Dewey Finn/Mr. Chips hybrid, and I’d still fail to grab them. But, like I said, I don’t place any sort of blame on them. To the contrary, I admire their temerity and- remembering the 8:00 a.m. French class I was blessed with my freshman year- I don’t just sympathize; I empathize. As if watching me draw some lame rhetorical triangle on the white board, they had a couple of days and reading assignments regarding rhetorical fallacies was in their not-so-distant future (unbeknownst to them).

I was almost as happy for myself as I was for them when I stumbled upon a page about something called “Rhetological Fallacies.” In short, this Rhetological Fallacies project added sharp, simple illustrations to about 50 rhetorical techniques and logical fallacies (not wanting to be restricted to the rhetorical nor the logical, they mixed them all together and created a new word to describe their finished product: rhetological). Here are just a few, which I picked at random:

“Rhetological Fallacies” was the brainchild of the absurdly talented David McCandless, on his thoroughly engaging website.

I saw a nice class exercise in the form of what McCandless calls Rhetological Bingo, wherein players search for faulty rhetorical or logical moves during a speech of a politician or other public figure. He provides an example of the matrix he came up with while listening to a speech on same-sex marriage from the U.K.’s most senior Catholic bishop.

He’s even kind enough to provide a cheat sheet for those of us (take me, for example) that might be a little rusty with respect to some of these terms.

So, I’m hoping my next class will provide my students with memorable illustrations of otherwise esoteric terms, which we will all apply together watching our politician of choice bullshit his or her way through another press conference. The only problem will be finding an example where the bullshit isn’t so prolific as to overwhelm them as they try to identify all of them.

World Erotic Art Museum

hoag — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:29:16 +0000

“Do not cede your desire" – Jacques Lacan

"Desire is a gift in life” – Chris Corner (IAMX)

The World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, Florida, is a brilliant study in desire as well as an implicit deconstruction of the opposition between pornography and art. My recent visit there thus not only provided me with much food for thought and aesethetic enjoyment, but certainly tickled my loins. The WEAM (yes, even the acronym for the joint sounds suspiciously erotic) has captured the hearts not only of Floridians, but art-lovers from all around the world as well, so I'd love to have the pleasure of sharing my experience of the museum with you.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

The first thing one notices about the WEAM is its location. Hidden away on the second floor of its respective building, the WEAM can be easy to miss, but I think this stands as key to its role as part of Miami Beach’s cultural unconscious—i.e., as images of 1,000 “competing” desires tucked away from apparent view. One ascends to the WEAM in a rickety elevator and finds oneself in the gift shop suddenly surrounded by erotic books, t-shirts, postcards, and piggy banks made to look like sperm cells. After sheepishly paying the $15 to enter, the thought occurs: “Just how trashy is this place going to be?” But within seconds after entering the exhibits, any notion that the WEAM is less than a collection of artistic genius is thoroughly dashed.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

Nothing overcomes the idea that the WEAM is reducible to a pornographic peep show more than its septuagenarian collector and curator, Naomi Wilzig, whom I had the pleasure of meeting during my visit. Wilzig, who has been putting together the WEAM’s collection for the past twenty years, is a grandmother whose professional accomplishments have spanned a lifetime. She quietly moves through the museum thinking and observing, seemingly quiet and demure. However, discussing Wilzig’s collection or its purpose with her quickly reveals a fierce, uncompromising intellect and a vision to match it. In Wilzig's words, “[the WEAM is] an education and it’s an awakening that we all are sexual beings, in case you didn’t notice it, or didn’t remember it, or didn’t know it. And that the human body and sexual acts shouldn’t be forbidden but brought out into the open in their honesty and in their purity and in the fact that it expresses the love that people have for each other.”

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

The range of Wilzig’s collection itself is massive, so it's not surprising that my own journey through the WEAM took nearly three hours. Rather than dryly recounting everything that one can find there, let me share my impressions instead. I remember the mythologies of Adam and Eve as well as Leda and the Swan depicted in dozens of stunning ways. I remember works both praising and condemning Lady Godiva and Katherine the Great. I remember Zeus and his many loves surrounded by, appropriately enough, ancient Roman sex toys and figurines. And as I reached the museum’s “center,” I remember the impressive cultural range of the collection with its pieces from Africa and Indonesia, China, Japan, Mexico, France, and more, including contemporary pieces from “masters” such as Picasso and Klimt. There is also a large collection of wooden carvings, furniture, and body casts; photos of pin-up girls, Josephine Baker, and Marilyn Monroe; a bevy of erotic images hidden in almost every household object imaginable; fetish art; lesbian, gay, and bisexual photographs, and much more . Near the exit one can even find the infamous phallic murder weapon from the film A Clockwork Orange.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

It is a serious understatement to say that the WEAM provides a lot for a theorist of desire to ponder. For example, that the museum is called the World “Erotic” Art Museum rather than the “Sexual” Art Museum aligns its aims with the Foucauldian view that “sexuality” and the categories of sexual identity are fairly recent inventions, whereas the erotic exchanges between bodies and pleasures are much "older." Moreover, with a keen eye one can discern histories of desire and histories of sexuality being produced as one builds narratives while traversing through the museum. These histories of desire and sexuality not only teach one something about history (that it is indeed produced), but also provide a philosophical hammer with which one can smash seemingly intractable notions about what constitute “proper” or “moral” or “correct” desires today. However, while traversing the museum one may also feel the Foucauldian worry concerning the monitoring of desire, that is, by “liberating” our desire and making it visible and public that we simultaneously open it to normative surveillance and control.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

There is also a fascinating rhetoric operating throughout the WEAM’s collection, making it difficult to tell whether the vocabularies employed are being used euphemistically, for the purposes of academic legitimization (e.g., the word “tumescent” is used innumerable times), or something else altogether. One also gets the wonderfully dizzying impression that the collection is amassed independently of a morally-judgmental eye, that is, one finds images of erotic encounters of all kinds and between all types of beings (i.e., not only hetero-normative and anthropo-normative images). One thus feels as though the WEAM is a space where flows of desire can operate in a more unfettered fashion, where desiring-machines are increasingly capable of “hooking up” and sharing affects as well as bodily fluids (N.B., the museum contains particularly large restrooms hidden away in the rear of the exhibits).

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

Perhaps what I’m suggesting, then, is that the WEAM operates in accordance with an Lacanian/Deleuzian ethics of desire, an ethics where desire is allowed to breathe, rather than attempting to eliminate or yolk it. The museum challenges us to ask whether we have acted in conformity with our desire as part of an ethical life, and challenges us to consider what explosive effects follow when desire (and/as the unconscious-nonconscious) is problematically and systematically bridled. The WEAM also asks us to consider what it is possible for us to do with our bodies, and to consider the range of experience and experiments that a body is capable of (that is, the museum asks us to confront not only the organs of our bodies, but also our bodies without organs). In sum, the museum relentlessly demands that we come to see ourselves as desiring beings, ones that produce desire in response to the call of living. Indeed the WEAM calls us to see immanent life itself as the unfolding and striving of desire.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

So if you’re ever in Miami Beach, check out the WEAM. Let it call you into the problem-questions of art and desire. And while you’re at it, don’t be afraid of that stirring in the loins. It’s all part of the experience. We swear that it won’t affect your vision or the hairiness of your palms…

Assignment: The Flexible Final Project

Megan Eatman — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:26:28 +0000

Screenshot from student project Evolution, Not Revolution by Lacey Teer

Last semester, I wrote my final blog post about using iMovie in the classroom. This semester, I attempted to correct some of the issues that arose when I asked all my students to use multimodal argumentation for their final papers. What follows is an outline of the final project I assigned and information about the changes I made to address various problems. This information will also appear on our "Teaching" page, along with sample student projects.

Assignment

Students were allowed to make their final argument in whatever means they felt was most effective. This decision allowed students to make decisions based at least in part on their individual skill sets. Students were given specific standards for their argument that applied regardless of its form; for example, they were required to designate an audience and place of publication, use the rhetorical appeals discussed in class to persuade that audience, and construct an argument that added something to the conversation they had been studying all semester. There were also specific warnings about what was appropriate--or, rather, inappropriate--for multimodal assignments. Students were warned not to turn in a single picture with words on top of it because that would not show the appropriate effort or skill.

Preparation

Because this was a unit-long assignment, students had a lot of preparation. Our in-class preparation focused mostly on multimodal argumentation because it was the least familiar and because, after receiving project proposals, I realized that all but a few students were making a multimodal text. There was also a fair amount of overlap; we could sometimes talk about both in the same class. We spent class time learning iMovie, the basics of Photoshop, and talking about the rhetorical power of sound. We looked at a variety of sample projects, some by actual students (from my previous class and other classes) and some that were created in other contexts, to talk about their effectiveness.

Assessment

These will be graded according to the successful execution of the standards listed on their assignment sheet.

Feedback

While I have not received feedback from students on this project, leaving the project open (rather than forcing students to argue a certain way) seems to have been a good decision. The quality of projects already appears higher, and I am sure the arrangement is less stressful for students. The purpose of this assignment is to encourage students to think about the available means of persuasion, including the various media available to them, and then use them to make an effective argument. I hope that this assignment has given students a chance to reflect not just on persuasive strategies, but on the advantages and pitfalls of various media for making specific arguments.

Hell-O?: Glee’s Karotic Appeals

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:24:34 +0000

Image Credit: Hulu

Glee’s return last night to television with their new episode “Hell-O” not only served to get my students excited this morning before class, but also demonstrated the utility of using rhetorical concepts to analyze the musical genre. In this unit of my class my students are considering how kairos informs musical performances.

Kairos, defined by Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee as “situational kind of time, something close to what we call ‘opportunity’ (as in ‘the time is ripe’),” is a concept that works well for thinking through musicals as it asks students to complicate their ideas of context and audience. What appeals may work for one group at one particular time and place might not serve as well in another time. Arguments about, say, feminism receive a different reception today than they did in 1960, so an analysis of Bye Bye Birdie would want to take that into account. Because students can often assume that audiences’ dispositions are constant, looking at a contemporary cultural example like Glee can show students how kairos is both situational and can be created by careful rhetors.

In the case of this episode, which just aired yesterday, “Hell-O” seeks to draw viewers back into the world of Glee over four months after the previous episode, “Sectionals,” which showed New Directions winning their glee club sectionals competition. “Hell-O” also has to establish the new conflict between the club and their regionals rival Vocal Adrenalin as well as the new romantic developments between Finn, Rachel, and Rachel’s new suitor Jesse St. James. Thus the show takes advantage of this moment of re-introduction by incorporating a number of songs into the show that contain the word “Hello” in their title, as by including Lionel Richie’s famous number:

What makes this number successful is not only the charm of Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff (former co-stars in Spring Awakening) but also the winking inclusion of the number into the plot. This song sets up the lonely Rachel Berry to fall in love with the successful senior St. James as it simultaneously introduces him and his vocal abilities to the show’s viewers. The violinists who pop up in the background ready to accompany them acknowledge the musical genre’s falsity while also drawing attention to the moment’s created “magic.” After this scene, the teenage Rachel is ready to think of herself as “in love” with a man she barely knows, and the music sets the audience up to believe this. Likewise, the show’s closing number “Hello Goodbye” works towards a similar goal:

The titular hello and goodbye demonstrate the complex division and development in the Rachel and Finn relationship: while the episode started with Rachel assuming that she and the reluctant Finn were dating, it ends with Finn interested in Rachel, while she is pursing a secret relationship with Jesse. In other words, as she says goodbye, he says hello. Their body language as they move back and forth reverses the dynamic of the first thirteen episodes: now he is the pursuer, and she the pursued. However, coming at the end of the episode, this number sets up their new romantic conflict for this season’s remaining eight episodes. The show says goodbye for the evening, but lets us know that this is far from permanent. Here, Glee takes advantage of the kairotic moment to not only maintain its meta-discourse by winking to the audience but also to set up dramatic arcs and create narrative tension between the New Directions group and Vocal Adrenaline; the road to hell is paved with hello, in other words. While the reviews have been mixed about certain other elements in this episode, I only wish my students could grasp kairos as easily as Glee does here.

Killer of Sheep

dsmith — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:24:55 +0000

Charles Burnett’s little known and nearly plotless masterpiece, Killer of Sheep, offers a tender yet realistic vision of life in 1970s Watts, the racially segregated suburb of Los Angeles where poverty, racism, and riots doomed the area to generations of social and economic oblivion. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, Burnett’s camera lingers on characters—many played by non-actors—to reveal situations of familial intimacy and communal identification.

An opening scene shows a young girl in the mask of a dog. Such expressive sadness in the features of the animal hides the perceptive eyes and facial gestures of the child. Her father, Stan (played by Henry Gayle Sanders), exhausted from working shifts at a Los Angeles slaughterhouse, lays linoleum on the kitchen floor. A sensitive man, burdened with domestic duty and physical labor, Stan’s story offers occasion for audiences to reflect on the dislocation of his desire from the circumstances of his life.

Other images show children at play in an urban debris field; a young man casually walks away with a television set; children act out and are disciplined; petty gangsters arrive to tempt Stan to join them in a robbery. But the central narrative focuses on Stan and his relationship to his family and community.

This emotionally complex film, however, argues for the ambiguity of Stan’s relation to others—particularly his wife, with whom sexual intimacy is a problem. Attempts to help friends, too, often result in mishap, such as when Stan helps purchase a new engine block, only to have it fall out of the back of his pick-up as he puts it in gear. Stan’s main joy in life seems, in fact, to come through his work at the slaughterhouse, ushering sheep along to their final moments before the processing of their flesh.

Made on a budget of only $10,000 while he was a student at UCLA, Burnett’s film doesn’t try to ameliorate Stan’s situation. Instead, he argues for a vision of reality that refuses to perform to the social and racial expectations of others. He shows us, instead, a strange beauty that, perhaps against the viewer’s will, refuses to correspond to an appropriate system of values. Such tension brings viewers into a film that also denies the urgency of a crafted message, documenting instead the motives of communal actors. The final scene—a baby shower for a young pregnant woman—could have pushed the narrative into sentimentality (Spike Lee, for instance, can’t seem to live without it). Instead, viewers witness an exchange of human forces. Although we are not in the realm of Longinus’ sublime, the neo-realistic narrative nonetheless argues for a human vision that transcends social and economic behavior.

Listed in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry and rated by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the top films of all time, Killer of Sheep is an American treasure, despite only recently acquiring the attention it deserves.

The rhetoric of wandering around your apartment in your bathrobe

John Jones — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 21:33:34 +0000

The New York Times has an article on architects Jeremy Fletcher and Alejandra Lillo of Graft, who have designed a new condo tower in Manhattan, the W Downtown, with glass walls. According to Fletcher and Lillo, the purpose of the see-through design is to “[work] out a dialogue between voyeurism and exhibitionism”:

Not only will the building’s glass walls allow W residents to see, and be seen by, passers-by on the street below, but Mr. Fletcher and Ms. Lillo have created peekaboo features within each apartment, like a window between the kitchen and the bedroom, and a bathroom that’s a glass cube, allowing residents to expose themselves to their roommates and family members, too. The idea, Mr. Fletcher said, was to frame and exhibit the intimate details of life, or at least ones that would be aesthetically pleasing, “like your silhouette in the shower.”

My first thought when reading this piece was that if someone wanted to expose his or herself to a roommate or family member, it could be done without peekaboo windows. More germane to this blog, I find the focus on performance to be very interesting. The author of the article, Penelope Green, connects this trend in architecture to Facebook and YouTube, where users regularly “expose” the intimate details of their lives for all the world to see. The difference between the two, Green points out, is that the information users post to these sites is “conscious,” that is, carefully chosen and scripted to present an image that the user wants to project, while the mundane details of day-to-day living is “unconscious.” Fletcher points out that his and Lillo’s design is open to the kind of careful choreography available online:

“We are creating stages for people to perform on in some way, but it’s a very scripted and considered display,” he said. “Cooking could be a display, for example, with your partner watching you from the bedroom.”

He talked about tuning the privacy of each room, using shades or scrims to have larger or smaller openings, as you would change the aperture of a camera. “So if you don’t want your partner to see you shaving your legs in the shower,” he said, “you can pull the shade.

However, the reality of living in a glass house seems more likely to lend itself to this experience:

In September, Curbed, the feisty New York City real estate blog, posted a photograph of a newly completed, glass-walled condo building on East 13th Street. You could see right into the apartments, which looked most like messy dorm rooms. It was a grubby retort to the marketing hoo-ha that surrounds these now ubiquitous buildings and trumpets a sleekly attractive lifestyle accessorized by midcentury modern furniture and designer clothing. There were unmade beds jammed right up against the glass, mangled paper Venetian shades, a towel over a chair.

The article then ventures into questions of what we will do if we have to perform all the time, without having a private retreat to some place where we can drape our towels with abandon. It’s an interesting read.

9/11 Report -- Graphic Novel vs. Authorized Edition

Nate Kreuter — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 23:39:25 +0000

Students in my Rhetoric of Spying Class recently read sections of the 9/11 Commission Report, along with the graphic novel version of the report (for a thorough discussion of the graphic novel version and its critics, including some great links, click here).

Reactions to the graphic novel were mixed, and more students were critical of the graphic novel version than I expected. I was also surprised by why many of the students were critical of the graphic novel. Rather than argue that it was irreverent towards the events of 9/11, many argued that the graphic novel obscured too many of the Authorized Edition's more detailed points. I'm not sure whether the students really thought this or were telling me what they thought I wanted to hear. (I personally can see a lot of advantages in the graphic novel version, such as audience accessibility, which my students also pointed out.)

At any rate, I think that comparisons of related written and visual texts can be very productive in the rhetoric/comp classroom. If you are an instructor or teacher with a story about an a similarly comparative exercise you'd like to share, we'd love to hear about it in the comments section.

Visual examples of rhetorical figures

John Jones — Tue, 01 May 2007 17:02:06 +0000

If you are interested in rhetoric, hopefully you are already a reader of “It Figures,” where author Figaro provides examples of rhetorical figures in contemporary discourse. He also provides witty images to go along with his posts, some of which go beyond decoration by being excellent visual examples of the figures he is illustrating. In a recent post, he introduces a new figure—the “portmanym” or the “figure of conjoined names”—illustrated by a mashup of Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney (which, to my eye, looks strangely like John Kerry). You can see the post here—if you dare.

Aristotle, On Rhetoric

John Jones — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 22:21:00 +0000

Entry:

Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civil Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. Ed. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.(Full text)

Author: Aristotle