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

Using the epideictic rhetoric as a theoretical lens to flesh out a more substantial view of visual rhetoric allows in turn a view of epideictic rhetoric as more than “mere rhetoric,” that is, as words divorced from action. 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?

Currently, my view of epideictic rhetoric is limited to my readings in Classical Rhetoric last semester and a few articles we have read in Public Rhetoric this semester. While several of these readings have cast epideictic rhetoric in a positive light (some, like Cynthia Miecznikowski Sheard in “The Public Value of Epideictic Rhetoric,” and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca in their New Rhetoric, even see epideictic rhetoric as productive), the dominant view (a mere boogeyman at this point of my research) seems to either ignore epideictic rhetoric – in favor of more deliberative rhetorics – or to dismiss it as the kind of rhetoric that is most allied with manipulation, distortion and propaganda. That is, in the binary of logos and pathos (where Reason is celebrated and emotion vilified), epideictic rhetoric suffers from its alignment with the underprivileged side of this age-old dichotomy.

Using research I have previously done on cognitive science and its relationship to rhetoric (I touch on this briefly here), and how cognition is not merely “hijacked” by emotion, but how functional-emotional development drives and constitutes acts of cognition, I want to argue that visual texts (as symbolic action) can affect humans’ emotions to quite literally change (how) their minds (work). In this way, visual rhetoric works like epideictic rhetoric (seen and celebrated more productively).

It is, to use Burkean language, at the nonrational level that much of what we call “the rational” rests (additionally, I plan on exploring Kenneth Burke’s (soon to be read) essay on “portraying” in the recently published Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955). Deliberative acts of persuasion, that address only this rational level, fail to address the sub-stances that motivate human action (see Marshall Alcorn). As even a preliminary look at cognitive science reveals (Gregory and Gladwell, for instance), the visual can have profound impacts on determining how we act in situations.