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

"Literacy means more than words, and visual literacy means more than play." (16)

Related to my post on "What is Visual Rhetoric," I want to challenge the base assumptions of which George is working. Literacy is more than words. But if our students are already visually literate, what are we teaching them. I'm not saying that we aren't teaching them anything, but I think that articulating more rigorous and specific answers to this question will help us to better adapt visual rhetoric to our purposes in the composition classroom.

As for the new term in the above quote, I think George's biggest mistake is to accept both the association between visual rhetoric and play and to reject the pedagogical use of play. This article doth protest too much and never escapes the play associations of visual rhetoric. As much as I would like to see play redeemed as a means of learning (thanks Gladwell, thanks Jenkins, thanks Lanham), I think that discussion should be conducted outside of the field of visual rhetoric. They are seperate issues.