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

Deciding to work on visual representations of trauma is a difficult project for me to commit to.  First of all, as I learned when writing my thesis, continually exposing myself to images of trauma was both painful and exhausting.  However, I think that the pain that I felt when watching films like Memento and Identity is further evidence that my proposed project is worth exploring.  That being said, I intend to look at further visual representations of trauma to explore the rhetorical moves that create empathy.  I am convinced that much of this empathy is created through the visual experience of film, photography, etc.  Part of my argument for this depends on recent research on mirror neurons.  Since that research indicates that there is a connection between viewing an event and feeling an event, I want to argue that viewing representations of trauma will engender a greater understanding of the experience and the process of recovery.  I'm less concerned with the visual representation of the traumatizing event itself and more concerned with how the individual experience of trauma is reconstructed through visual narrative.  Since my previous research was propelled by my belief that visual representations of trauma helps those who have not experienced traumas to understand the kinds of effects that trauma has on an individual's life.  Ultimately, I hoped that such an understanding would create an environment more conducive to healing.

As a graduate student in professional writing, my research interests reflect the realm of professional and technical writing as it applies both to academia and business. Research exists to both ends, but there is a very distinct gap between the two fields. For example, there exists much research about uses of PowerPoint as a presentation software. Because it merges information (text) with visuals, within a public realm, it invites analysis of its effectiveness of a presentation software. Dale Cyphert in his article “The Problem of PowerPoint: Visual Aid or Visual Rhetoric?” discusses the widespread use of PowerPoint, claiming that while the software holds promise for attractive, exciting, dynamic presentations, PowerPoint slides often take on a life of their own, much to the detriment of the overall presentation (80). Cyphert incorporates PowerPoint into his classroom lessons about using PowerPoint effectively, and he questions how the nature of presentations would differ with different presentation software. 

While I can find quite a bit of information on fanfiction and fan communities in general, very little has been written about fanvids, apart from Machinema. Because I am not so much interested in the community-driven aspects of fanvids, however, these articles will not comprise the majority of my research.
I could also cite Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (and probably will), but again, authenticity and authority are not my main concern. Because I want to figure out what it is fans-auteurs know about visual rhetoric, what conventions they mainly rely on, and what genres they most heavily draw on, I will most likely have to rely on film theory.

Hallucinations (outside of the context of the "insane") was introduced into American culture in the early 50s with the CIA doing research that could be applied to espionage.  The CIA did research on first cannabis, soon followed by LSD.  Lysergic acid was a new compound and was tested in various ways (including on prisoners and in mental asylums, on military personnel, and dosing various employees at the bureau without their knowledge).  The CIA contracted with scientists across the country and handed out large grants on the research of LSD.  Through these academic communities LSD began to soak into wider American culture.  Around this same time popular articles were starting to emerge on mushroom consumption and various indigenous religions (many the curanderos and various spiritual beliefs of South American tribes that utilized hallucinogens).    

There is a wealth of scholarship on spectator positions, thanks to film studies. Rather attempt a review of all of this, I'll highlight a few pieces of scholarship that look at the visual contruction of subjectivities outside of film.

First is Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, which I have only dealt with thus far through secondary sources. The Arcades are proto-shopping malls and Benjamin was fascinated with how they used architecture, excessive visual stimulation and capitalism to construct the subject as a mobile gaze. As film theory also notes, the very act of looking can construct a position of power. Leisure is crucial to this work and the failure of intimacy and implication between the spectator and the spectacle is something that I, and hopefully, Benjamin, see as crucial to how modernist subjectivity assumes class, gender, race and nationalistic priviledges to isolate the subject from the external world. Benjamin's canonical essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" partakes of a similar logic that considers the nature of community and the spectator.

What I Know: Beyond my own experience, I know that surprisingly (to me) little work has been done on movie trailers in an academic setting. There is no record of any published academic article that addresses the topic at any great length, and film studies seems content to focus almost exclusively on films themselves rather than their marketing in the forms of trailers.

However, I also know after research that one book has been published on trailers: Coming Attractions by Lisa Kernan. Kernan addresses the trailer question both anatomically (the substance of a trailer) and rhetorically (she focuses on the question, “Who are these trailers talking to?”). Her book confirms that there is little published academic work on trailers, and that the work that has appeared tends to be popular in nature, such as editorials in newspapers and such, so her book is pretty much the first, the last, the everything on trailers.

I have chosen as my general topic an exploration of how brain and cognitive processes intersect with rhetoric, metaphor, and language use. It should be no surprise that I have chosen this project largely on Nathaniel's influence, and owe much of my knowledge on the subject to him.

However, I did read a text this summer which may tangentially inform this project: The First Idea by Greenspan and Shanker. The book argues that human language processes are owed more to institutions and traditions than actual genetic coding, which is a direct counterposition to someone like Pinkert who believe in the language gene. They also argue that human cognition is as dependent on functional emotional development as it is on rational and logical development.

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?

If we believe Purdue’s own Pat Sullivan (and why wouldn’t we), an extremely close and specific look at the pedagogical uses of advertisements has never been composition studies’ forte. The subject has either been: belonging to communications departments, too obviously a bad thing to bother with, or too distasteful a topic to encroach. Which is semi-ironic because as early as 1953, CCCC panel reports were giving the green light to using newspapers and ads in the composition classroom (hesitantly, I might add). Therefore, the analysis of ads were one of the first pop culture texts to enter comp classrooms, and are subsequently our longest running ones. Nevertheless, I researched the history of pop culture in the comp classroom last semester and direct mentions of ads are few. For this paper I want to give a category list of current and previous uses, which looks something like this at the moment: