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

During the next sixty pages of Lanham’s text, I was thinking about the ways that the term visual as it applies to any kind of rhetoric might have changed throughout rhetoric’s history. In classical Greece, the canon of delivery presupposed a range of gestures, facial and body expressions, tonal shifts, and physical movement. Arguably, the delivery of the words would seem only part of the presentation; the presentation itself would seem to be more of a highlight. Before electronic texts became as widespread as they are today, visual rhetoric, I imagine, was largely confined to the constraints imposed by the physical page. For us, today, the term visual rhetoric includes considerations of not only paper quality, color, and thickness, ink quality and color, and uses of graphics, margins, text placement, etc. but also the interplay of the digital and spatial page with the aforementioned visual elements. It is interesting for me to think about the ways that our understanding of the term visual changes in application.