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Unlike the caricature of cultural studies approaches, there’s not one ideological goal toward which visually or culturally themed writing classes are to move. Students can’t be persuaded that they need to overthrow industrial capitalism or the military-industrial complex, even if that is our heart’s desire. They live and move in the middle of consumerism, and more proximate goals might be to understand that persuasion is nonstop, that the most effective form of persuasion comes from the subject being persuaded, that understanding contemporary uses of rhetoric (including visual ones) is a necessary condition for their own agency and independent thought, and that in order to attain that understanding they need to write (and otherwise create) their identities, remaking culture in the process to serve their purposes. Burke offers us not only one of several tools to advance this process, but a coherent philosophical position, that of dramatism, which can be used to reconceive of this whole undertaking as performance, with students taking on public roles.
(Thanks to Lane Bitterman, Laura Donovan, Ashley Parrent, and Melissa Walter for permission to use screenshots from their weblogs.)