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

Before and After Page Design looks like a very interesting and useful book that I'll be sure to use at some point in the future. However, I noticed some interesting things in the introduction. First, there's the linking of design to "cool." We just read an introduction to cool studies by Liu in Postmodern class, and design is certainly a major part of cool. Liu writes how cool is an attitude or stance taken towards information-- a kind of meta-awareness of how something is making us aware, and often linked to technological skill or prowess. Mcwade writes "design doesn't belong to a certain class of people" (xi). Good, and this is actually accurate with Liu's notions of cool, which requires taking the "right" stance towards information, which is technically possible for anyone. But Liu ignores how there are battles for cool and attempts to define oneself against others who are not cool-- in other words, I think their are power-plays in cool and design which I have not seen fully addressed.

You know, the thing I most dug about watching Vertigo was actually not something I could have only gotten from Vertigo, but rather something I could only have gotten from Vertigo from watching it with Visual Rhetoric eyes. It was this: in weird movies (my use of "weird" is intentionally and ironically pejorative) people are always doing things that don't make any sense.

In Vertigo, there is no good reason for Scottie to 1) follow Carlotta/the wife 2) follow her so closely 3) get so engrossed in her story 4) spurn Midge... (and speaking of Midge, there's no good goddamn reason for her to literally paint so unflatttering a portrait of herself).

Several discussion threads have been exploring the place of digital and electronic mediums in the composing process and composition classroom. David and Richards make some interesting points about the interconnectedness of cultural influences with the discourse of our students, namely in the form of visual communication. And while I acknowledge the importance of understanding cultural influences, I am also wondering about the rationale for our push to do so.

Per one of the discussion questions, I got to thinking that maybe the real issue isn’t as specific as should we/and how do we incorporate more visual rhetoric into the composition class. At least not for me. As George asserts, it’s probably a bad idea to if your justification is merely holding student interest or making the class more “fun.” Don’t get me wrong, I believe these are great things to strive for, just not good enough for the sole base of a pedagogy. I think the real issue is how can we create assignments that better reflect the composing processes that students are all ready participating in and simultaneously help them better understand and interpret the arguments that surround their daily lives. I don’t feel the tired ol’ academic essay fits any of these requirements. The world does not come at them in the form of well-wrought and logically-based essays, it comes at them in a wash of visuals, text, emotion, and desire. They don’t sit down to make sense of/or contribute to this interplay by writing an essay, but many of them compose in multimedia environments on a daily basis (have you seen the loving visual rhetoric some teens put into their Myspace pages!).

I will frequently ask my students to analyze/critique advertisements. I think they provide a good backdrop for discussions about topics like the proofs, or rhetorical situation. Issues of audience or tone or style or subject or ethos or pathos really become visible in ways that, I think, other texts cannot provide. As George notes, this generation of students is very media-literate. They are targets of media in ways and through channels that our brains cannot even comprehend. So, my rationale for using ads is to provide a familiar frame through they can begin thinking about and discussing new concepts. Plus, they like the pretty pictures. Also, students’ varying degrees of textual literacy warrants consideration. Some people learn best through visuals, and others prefer to learn through visuals.

So-

Love Diana George's aim of opening our eyes to why we haven't put more Viz Rhet in our classes. Killer. All about the eye-opening.

But how much can we do this? How many one-ups can we perform (e.g. the comp-rhet ideology argument with Berlin that gets bigger and bigger forever) before we're taking TOO MUCH into our comp classes, or are we already there? Cue ominous music.

Sacrilege, I

"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.

In Photoshop for Democracy, Jenkins emphasizes that new software has enabled amateur users to create professional results from the safety of their very own homes. We can, of course, substitute "iMovie" for "Photoshop" throughout this chapter.
What a rhetorician might notice is that with the poached screen caps and scenes (and in fanfics, poached plots and characters), "invention" becomes less about the act of creation and seems more and more like "arrangement"--to make an argument for Harry/Snape or Kirk/Spock, fans borrow already present media, already present stories and backstories (and dialogue, scenery, music, etc), and rearrange them to make their arguments. Additionally, these new arguments are already troped: There are only so many ways to write a Harry/Snape fic or to present a Kirk/Spock vid. These seem to be acting like Aristotle's topoi; fans are aware of a range of possible options, and they recombine them in new ways.

A note or two on the author:

1. Jenkins is eager to celebrate viewer control over content. I am as well, but not in all contexts and with all content. For example, fans eager for shows to extend their runs are often wrong. I had no democratic access to Seinfeld during its run. Larry David (who left the show after the seventh season) and Jerry Seinfeld exercised a large amount of control over the show. Seinfeld, seizing the moment, decided that the show had reached the end of its run and he wanted it to go out on top. Anymore Seinfeld now would risk disappointing. The creators had a vision and stuck to it despite the presence of a strong fan base that wanted more and network that was willing to pay.

So I've been delving more and more into trailer stuff, and I found some things I thought some of you might find interesting.

The book A Cinema of Coming Attractions discusses trailers as phenomena unto themselves. We see trailers, Lisa Kernan argues, in a different way from how we see movies, since trailers make us aware that we are watching an advertisement for a movie (thus destroying our suspension of disbelief) and yet we can be totally engrossed in the experience. Furthermore, various trailer machinations actually make us nostalgic for the movie, which we haven't seen yet. It seems to me that this nostalgia is created by piggybacking off of things we already hold dear, like soft music or archetypal life events (break-ups, death, getting some).