Week 3

Read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, pp. 99 - end.. Post your weekly reading response to your blog. Be sure to tag it as "Weekly Reading Response" when you select the category. Here are some questions do get you going. You don't have to respond to this question in particular if something else worth writing about occurs to you.

In the section on "The Theory of Mind Reading" (p. 197), Gladwell begins an interesting discussion of Tomkins and Eckman's work on Imagery, Affect, and Consciousness that ends up suggesting, among other things, that "[e]motion can start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process" (208). If emotions are primary and possibly expressed on the body first, with consciousness of emotion secondary, what might that suggest about persuasion? About consciousness of feeling as an interpretive process? About consciousness as rationalization or, even, as Burke puts it, "prophesying after the event"? (For more on this topic, check out this short piece by David Blakesley called "Prophesying after the Event" and Daniel Gilbert's "Illusion of External Agency" (PDF format) and his idea that "motivated human cognition" involves a process of subjectively optimizing outcomes."
Group Project assigned and discussed.

Read: From Visual Intelligence by Ann Barry (PDF format; 925 kb)
Read: Daniel Gilbert, "The Assent of Man: Mental Representation and the Control of Belief" (PDF format) and "How Mental Systems Believe" (PDF format).
Due: A Contract Proposal in which you explain your subject, suggest some parameters for your research, and indicate why the subject interests you and how studying it will be beneficial. (Suggested length: 150-200 words). Post your contract proposal as a blog message. Be sure to select the category "Contract Proposal (1)."

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