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

I have completely reconstructed my project idea (hence, the new info entry) to account for my indecisiveness and my desire to simultaneously discuss and produce visual rhetoric. Much like my project, this entry is a hybrid, attempting to propose, clarify and inform. So, here it is (bereft of a pithy title):

My project explores the intersection between science and rhetoric as I attempt to use the findings of neurocognitive scientists and the strategies of visual rhetoric. First, I intend to present an exploration of the current scientific literature. The corpus is quite large, so I will try to choose the most representative works to include and provide additional resources for further study. I believe this to be a particularly important resource because many rhetoricians are less familiar with the primary sources of scientific inquiry and the temptation to rely upon more popular (yet certainly reliable) sources is great. Unfortunately, in writing for a lay audience, frequently publications like Scientific American are unable to present the important intricacies of the research. I don’t expect to be able to capture all of these myself but hope to design and promote the site so that scholars from different disciplines to contribute their knowledge to the site. This idea was inspired by Henry Jenkins report of Survivor fans who pool their knowledge in attempts to “spoil” the show. Although I find the intellectual work of fans to be valuable in its own right, I understand Jenkins point that if this kind of dedication and collaboration could be applied to something like the electoral process, it could result in significant political change. I hope to encourage the same kind of collaborative work among disciplines studying the visual.

There are still a few annotations missing, since I didn't get the books until today. This will be updated as I read over break.

“Fanvid-Recs.” 8 March 2007. http://www.fanvid-rec.com.

This site hosts downloadable fanvids from about two dozen fandoms. All videos are recommended by other “vidders” who provide comments in blog form as to why the video is worthy of being posted. Because the videos must be recommended and available for download, they are likely to be of the highest quality—vids available only on YouTube are considered transient and not as “professional” by many fans.

Attached is my annotated bibliography in a Word file. Please let me know if you have any trouble opening or accessing the file.

Dave-

Attached is my annotated bibliography for the information phase of the project. My research is going well - I'm starting to find some interesting sources, and these have led me to even more great sources yet to be explored. I read two chapters of Steven Pinkert's The Language Instinct, but have not yet included it in the bibliography. I have also found two fantastic collections, Action to Language via the Mirror Neuron System and Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language, but both are extremely expensive and I've had to order them through interlibrary loan.

My information project is attached below.

Annotated Bibliography

Burke, Kenneth. “Lexicon Rhetoricae”. Counter-Statement. Hermes: Los Altos, 1953.

Burke’s “Lexicon” investigates literary appeal and lays out terms for use in such an endeavor. Defining form in literature as “an arousing and fulfillment of desires,” Burke splits form into progressive form, repetitive form, conventional form, and minor or incidental forms.

At the last minute, just this week, I realized that, through the feminist discourse of drag and performativity, I could really have some fun with avatars. By that I don’t mean the obvious topic of avatar-transvestism, but rather using theories of performativity to question how avatars both posit and challenge ideas of a stable self. At the same time, this will allow me to consider the ways that a subject position changes when it transitions from observing to being observable. Avatars will not be the topic of this paper, rather I will address them as a technology which is linked in a causal loop with a certain ideology which makes epistemological assumptions and produces specific types of subjects. Unfortunately, this little revelation makes many of my previous sources somewhat irrelevant and brings numerous new players into the field. In an attempt to limit the texts I could potentially use, I’ve decided to take a feminist approach to the project.

From a project on the history of pop culture in comp classes for 591, I’ve got a wealth of information about how ads have been used and specifically discussed throughout history. Not surprisingly, the 50's and 60's were a time of relative hostility towards any pop culture in the classroom, with ads having the most base and ludicrous potential for pedagogy. By the 70's, highbrow distinctions were beginning to break down. Journal articles from Frank D’Angelo, Daniel Dieterich, and D.G. Kehl stand out as specifically focused on ads (a focus not found in the journal articles of our field very often). Some of these articles see no harm in ads while others use them as purposeful bad examples; what they share is a sense that students will not be harmed by using less “highbrow” materials and that there is value in using “texts” of everyday life in the classroom. There is enough range of assignment suggestions in this literature for me to have formed my categories for ad usage, mentioned in my previous post about this project. I also hope to soon look at some old text-books for even more examples.

How do we understand the frames of seeing as they are experienced? If we are limited, altered, given boundaries and metaphors by our language and culture that dictate what we see and how we see it, how would we know? Seeing around frames is a bit troublesome: they are frames, screens, rose colored glasses that we cannot remove without removing all other frames of reference. Considering these questions I am attempting to explore a region that is on the edge of our frames, and sometimes transcends various frames of reference (leaving the authors of the experience in a very difficult space of reporting); namely, the hallucination. My reasoning is that, if we examine those ways of seeing that are unsanctioned, odd, questionable, or unreal, we will be revealing some of the frames of reference that limit or control our vision. Beyond simply revealing various metaphors that control our vision (we are already aware of the frames that I will be exploring) I would like to explore why, what needs to be controlled, in regards to the vision or hallucination? In what ways do the various frames or approaches to understanding hallucination invite, reject, or ignore the experience of the author? What implications does this have on wider ways of seeing?

Attached please find my information project.