4)
“Reading the culture” doesn’t just mean decoding,
although decoding is a good place to start. It means reading it with an eye
to motives. Elements of Burke’s pentad are highly valuable for this purpose.
In this portion of my talk I want to illustrate with some examples from my winter
class, Writing About Visual Culture (which in turn drew from a book I’m
working on, What We See, which uses the concept of visual rhetoric to teach
rhetoric).
Because several theorists have overlapping systems for discussing
rhetoric, I try to offer several.
- Concepts of ethos, pathos, logos – these are particularly useful for
the vital task of crossing over from a discussion of the visual to their writing.
If you don’t do that, what you have may be valuable, but it’s
not applicable to a writing class in which students produce texts.
- From C. S. Peirce, index, icon, and symbol. This is to detach aspects of
what we consider to be elements of an image, or signs, for discussion. You
probably know this . . . a sign may be represented because produced as a trace
of a physical act—index; as something represented through physical resemblance—icon;
or as something assigned meaning arbitrarily by the culture—symbol.
So a photograph is a physical trace left on film or digital receptors, with
the true value we assign something that really happened, like a scar which
represents a wound. But a photograph is also flat, shot from a specific location
and perspective—icon.
And a photograph is likely to contain elements with cultural
significance, such as the stars and stripes. This is useful to denature images,
making them something rhetorical or directed to an audience for a purpose.
- Rhetorical canons—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
I use these, adapted to the relevant medium, as an overview early on, to establish
continuity in rhetoric as the media of representation change. As Kathleen
Welch has pointed out, the canons of memory and delivery become important
again with digital technology. Emphasizing delivery makes the case that it’s
not just words on a page, but a social transaction in specific institutional
circumstances which is the issue. Students can profit from reflecting on their
roles in these situations. Part of my argument here is that as students have
the capability of producing texts in which the visual component is part of
the meaning, they will need to do so, and do so well—so an aspect of
“writing” is moving toward design, in which including images as
illustration or as communicating data becomes relevant.
- Burke’s pentad. The purpose here is to make the case that every image
is produced and distributed and interpreted with purposes. There are motives
at work. Once they see intentionality in what they took to be casual or artistic
photos, not just advertisements but vacation shots, photos stuck into the
newspaper, etc., it can reveal the world as entirely suffused with rhetoric,
pulling us this way and that as we move through it. And at that point they
should be invited in . . .
I would like for the remainder of my presentation to situate my discussion
in a writing class taught in Winter 2005, Writing About Visual Culture.
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