5)

Institutional context: my university, like most, requires a two-semester sequence of required writing courses. The second semester can be devoted to a number of themes or topics. For a class in visual culture, we used Robert Atwan’s Convergences as a rich source of images, along with a manuscript, What We See. Course activities included keeping weblogs with entries at the pace of approximately one per week, and converting some of these topics into longer exploratory pieces. Most weblog entries were in response to prompts I provided—sample entries included

• Write about an ordinary object of your choice as a visual text
• Write about a visual cliché, using one or more images as a starting point
• Respond to photographs in Convergences by Cindy Sherman. What in them appears to be different from family photographs as you understand the genre?

Their choice of two of these and other topics were to be developed eventually into two of five required essays.

Several classes were devoted to ways of reading images as performances. (An image is any visual text which involves address, either by its creation and framing or by defining a point from which it is to be viewed.) In doing so, they are told to work from analysis to interpretation to response, with all three parts being necessary.

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