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Rivers Contract Proposal: Visual Rhetoric as Epideictic Rhetoric

Call me "old fashion" but earlier this semester I expressed interest in understanding the domains (or places) of visual rhetoric. With my project, I'd like to place visual rhetoric within the infamous (and dubious) Aristotelian taxonomy. While simultaneously critiquing and expanding Aristotle's (and by extension much contemporary) framing of epideictic rhetoric, I want to see (and perhaps wind-up arguing) how helpful it is to see visual rhetoric operating as a complexly envisioned epideictic rhetoric. Seeing epideictic rhetoric as foregrounding more deliberative and judicial rhetorics, how does visual rhetoric (visual texts) prime us (to use a term from Blink) for other persuasive texts?

Submitted by nrivers on Wed, 2007-01-24 16:24.
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Teach, Delight, Persuade, Portray
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Submitted by David Blakesley on Tue, 2007-01-30 09:40.

Excellent topic, Nathaniel. Here's one possibly interesting tack also: in the new Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, Burke adds a fourth office to the Ciceronian trifecta: "to portray." He has in mind the function of identification as an aim (in addition to the other three and its role there). I think he also has in mind an epideictic function. With its connections to the visual, it might be worth looking some more at how portrayal figures into this mix. You'd be breaking new ground, too. Laughing out loud