English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Ok, so this is really just the germ of an idea, but I reckon that’s what we’re shooting for in this contract proposal. Most, if not all, of my research interests involve finding better articulated goals, purposes, and uses of popular culture and mass media in the composition classroom. Much of the pedagogical discussion for the best few decades has been wrapped up in the concerns of critical culture studies and radical positions that always seek to interrogate popular culture as a site of rampant inequality and absolute horror. I am not blind to these aspects of it, and think this style of interrogation is an ongoing process. However, I also believe popular culture is currently more complex than ever and (shudder) can have redeeming qualities; additionally, constantly having our students solely interrogate it in a manner that constantly belittles and demeans does not help us break the view of instructors as fuddy duddies who simply want students to hate on everything.

That said, I want to investigate the pop culture item that is hardest to defend and find positivity in, but simultaneously is most pervasive. I speak of advertisements and commercials. There is certainly a long standing use of advertisements in the composition classroom and I want to investigate what those uses have been and how they have shifted. I am expecting these uses to be primarily content and message based. I do not wish to defend or champion advertising, however, I would like to recontextualize their uses in the composition classroom in line with the emerging theories of visual rhetoric. No, I’m not entirely sure what that means yet, but as I said, it’s the germ of an idea.