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| visual rhetoric: Visual Rhetoric Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, Diane S. Hope, 2008-03-20 Visual images, artifacts, and performances play a powerful part in shaping U.S. culture. To understand the dynamics of public persuasion, students must understand this visual rhetoric. This rich anthology contains 20 exemplary studies of visual rhetoric, exploring an array of visual communication forms, from photographs, prints, television documentary, and film to stamps, advertisements, and tattoos. In material original to this volume, editors Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope present a critical perspective that links visuality and rhetoric, locates the study of visual rhetoric within the disciplinary framework of communication, and explores the role of the visual in the cultural space of the United States. Enhanced with these critical editorial perspectives, Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture provides a conceptual framework for students to understand and reflect on the role of visual communication in the cultural and public sphere of the United States. Key Features and Benefits Five broad pairs of rhetorical action—performing and seeing; remembering and memorializing; confronting and resisting; commodifying and consuming; governing and authorizing—introduce students to the ways visual images and artifacts become powerful tools of persuasion Each section opens with substantive editorial commentary to provide readers with a clear conceptual framework for understanding the rhetorical action in question, and closes with discussion questions to encourage reflection among the essays The collection includes a range of media, cultures, and time periods; covers a wide range of scholarly approaches and methods of handling primary materials; and attends to issues of gender, race, sexuality and class Contributors include: Thomas Benson; Barbara Biesecker; Carole Blair; Dan Brouwer; Dana Cloud; Kevin Michael DeLuca; Anne Teresa Demo; Janis L. Edwards; Keith V. Erickson; Cara A. Finnegan; Bruce Gronbeck; Robert Hariman; Christine Harold; Ekaterina Haskins; Diane S. Hope; Judith Lancioni; Margaret R. LaWare; John Louis Lucaites; Neil Michel; Charles E. Morris III; Lester C. Olson; Shawn J. Parry-Giles; Ronald Shields; John M. Sloop; Nathan Stormer; Reginald Twigg and Carol K. Winkler This book significantly advances theory and method in the study of visual rhetoric through its comprehensive approach and wise separations of key conceptual components. —Julianne H. Newton, University of Oregon |
| visual rhetoric: Defining Visual Rhetorics Charles A. Hill, Marguerite Helmers, 2012-08-21 Images play an important role in developing consciousness and the relationship of the self to its surroundings. In this distinctive collection, editors Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers examine the connection between visual images and persuasion, or how images act rhetorically upon viewers. Chapters included here highlight the differences and commonalities among a variety of projects identified as visual rhetoric, leading to a more precise definition of the term and its role in rhetorical studies. Contributions to this volume consider a wide variety of sites of image production--from architecture to paintings, from film to needlepoint--in order to understand how images and texts work upon readers as symbolic forms of representation. Each chapter discusses, analyzes, and explains the visual aspect of a particular subject, and illustrates the ways in which messages and meaning are communicated visually. The contributions include work from rhetoric scholars in the English and communication disciplines, and represent a variety of methodologies--theoretical, textual analysis, psychological research, and cultural studies, among others. The editors seek to demonstrate that every new turn in the study of rhetorical practices reveals more possibilities for discussion, and that the recent turn to the visual has revealed an inexhaustible supply of new questions, problems, and objects for investigation. As a whole, the chapters presented here demonstrate the wide range of scholarship that is possible when a field begins to take seriously the analysis of images as important cultural and rhetorical forces. Defining Visual Rhetorics is appropriate for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in rhetoric, English, mass communication, cultural studies, technical communication, and visual studies. It will also serve as an insightful resource for researchers, scholars, and educators interested in rhetoric, cultural studies, and communication studies. |
| visual rhetoric: Still Life with Rhetoric Laurie E. Gries, 2015-03-05 In Still Life with Rhetoric, Laurie Gries forges connections among new materialism, actor network theory, and rhetoric to explore how images become rhetorically active in a digitally networked, global environment. Rather than study how an already-materialized “visual text” functions within a specific context, Gries investigates how images often circulate and transform across media, genre, and location at viral rates. A four-part case study of Shepard Fairey’s now iconic Obama Hope image elucidates how images reassemble collective life as they actualize in different versions, enter into various relations, and spark a firework of activity across the globe. While intent on tracking the rhetorical life of a single, multiple image, Still Life with Rhetoric is most concerned with studying rhetoric in motion. To account for an image’s widespread circulation and emergent activities, Gries introduces iconographic tracking—a digital research method for tracing an image’s divergent rhetorical becomings. Yet Gries also articulates a dynamic set of theoretical principles for studying rhetoric as a distributed, generative, and unforeseeable event that is applicable beyond the study of visual rhetoric. With an eye toward futurity—the strands of time beyond a thing’s initial moment of production and delivery—Still Life with Rhetoric intends to be taken up by those interested in visual rhetoric, research methods, and theory. |
| visual rhetoric: Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World Carolyn Handa, 2004-03-12 This sourcebook helps composition instructors consider what it means to teach visual rhetoric in the context of the multimedia classroom. Drawn from a range of disciplines, readings address visual argument, rhetoric of the image and design, and how culture shapes visual understanding. |
| visual rhetoric: Shaping Information Charles Kostelnick, Michael Hassett, 2003 In this wide-ranging analysis, Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett demonstrate how visual language in professional communication--text design, data displays, illustrations--is shaped by conventional practices that are invented, codified, and modified by users in visual discourse communities. |
| visual rhetoric: Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics Amy Propen, 2012-01-03 Parks, maps, and mapping technologies like the GPS are objects of visual and material culture that rely on the interplay of text, context, image, and space to guide our interpretations of the world around us. LOCATING VISUAL-MATERIAL RHETORICS: THE MAP, THE MILL, AND THE GPS examines in depth, and in several contemporary settings, how visual and material discursive artifacts, when understood as rhetorical, shape our understanding of the unique cultural moments that these artifacts set out to represent. |
| visual rhetoric: Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form Anne Demo, Bradford Vivian, 2012-03-12 This volume offers a multifaceted investigation of intersections among visual and memorial forms in modern art, politics, and society. The question of the relationships among images and memory is particularly relevant to contemporary society, at a time when visually-based technologies are increasingly employed in both grand and modest efforts to preserve the past amid rapid social change. The chapters in this book provide valuable insights concerning not only how memories may be seen (or sighted) in visual form but also how visual forms constitute noteworthy material sites of memory. The collection addresses this central theme with a wealth of interdisciplinary and international approaches, featuring conventional scholarly as well as artistic works from such disciplines as rhetoric and communication, art and art history, architecture, landscape studies, and more, by contributors from around the globe. |
| visual rhetoric: Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design Leslie Atzmon, 2011-03-11 The essays in VISUAL RHETORIC AND THE ELOQUENCE OF DESIGN foreground the rhetorical functions of design artifacts. Rhetoric, normally understood as verbal or visual messages that have a tactical persuasive objective—a speech that wants to convince us to vote for someone, or an ad that tries to persuade us to buy a particular product—becomes in Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design the persuasive use of a broad set of meta-beliefs. Designed objects are particularly effective at this second level of persuasion because they offer audiences communicative data that reflect, and also orchestrate, a potentially broad array of cultural concerns. Persuasion entails both the aesthetic form and material composition of any object. |
| visual rhetoric: Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature Katherine Acheson, 2016-12-05 Early modern printed books are copiously illustrated with charts, diagrams, and other kinds of images that represent systems of thought and ways of doing things. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature shows how these images fostered what Elizabeth Eisenstein called brainwork related to concepts of space, truth, art, and nature, and reveals their importance to poetry by Andrew Marvell and John Milton, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. The genres of illustration considered in this book include military strategy and tactics, garden design, instrumentation, Bibles, scientific schema, drawing instruction, natural history, comparative anatomy, and Aesop’s Fables. The argument produces unique insights into the ways in which visual rhetoric affected verbal expression, and the book develops novel methods of using printed images as evidence in the interpretation of the rich, strange, and beautiful literature of early modern England. |
| visual rhetoric: Posters for Peace Thomas W. Benson, 2015 A rhetorical history of Vietnam War era posters produced at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1970. Places the posters in the contexts of the politics of the 1960s and the history of political graphics. |
| visual rhetoric: What Images Really Tell Us Massimo Mariani, 2019 The author delivers an account of how to use the images to deliver the intended meaning. |
| visual rhetoric: Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action Bump Halbritter, 2012-11-26 Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action: Audio-Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers begins by placing audio-visual writing within established theoretical frames in rhetoric and composition and moves through a variety of applied pedagogical concerns with the aim of helping writing teachers use audio-visual writing assignments to realize a wide variety of learning goals in their writing classes. |
| visual rhetoric: Defining Visual Rhetorics Charles A. Hill, Marguerite Helmers, 2012-08-21 Images play an important role in developing consciousness and the relationship of the self to its surroundings. In this distinctive collection, editors Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers examine the connection between visual images and persuasion, or how images act rhetorically upon viewers. Chapters included here highlight the differences and commonalities among a variety of projects identified as visual rhetoric, leading to a more precise definition of the term and its role in rhetorical studies. Contributions to this volume consider a wide variety of sites of image production--from architecture to paintings, from film to needlepoint--in order to understand how images and texts work upon readers as symbolic forms of representation. Each chapter discusses, analyzes, and explains the visual aspect of a particular subject, and illustrates the ways in which messages and meaning are communicated visually. The contributions include work from rhetoric scholars in the English and communication disciplines, and represent a variety of methodologies--theoretical, textual analysis, psychological research, and cultural studies, among others. The editors seek to demonstrate that every new turn in the study of rhetorical practices reveals more possibilities for discussion, and that the recent turn to the visual has revealed an inexhaustible supply of new questions, problems, and objects for investigation. As a whole, the chapters presented here demonstrate the wide range of scholarship that is possible when a field begins to take seriously the analysis of images as important cultural and rhetorical forces. Defining Visual Rhetorics is appropriate for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in rhetoric, English, mass communication, cultural studies, technical communication, and visual studies. It will also serve as an insightful resource for researchers, scholars, and educators interested in rhetoric, cultural studies, and communication studies. |
| visual rhetoric: Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East Christiane Gruber, Sune Haugbolle, 2013-07-17 A collection of essays examining the role and power of images from a wide variety of media in today’s Middle Eastern societies. This timely book examines the power and role of the image in modern Middle Eastern societies. The essays explore the role and function of image making to highlight the ways in which the images “speak” and what visual languages mean for the construction of Islamic subjectivities, the distribution of power, and the formation of identity and belonging. Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East addresses aspects of the visual in the Islamic world, including the presentation of Islam on television; on the internet and other digital media; in banners, posters, murals, and graffiti; and in the satirical press, cartoons, and children’s books. “This volume takes a new approach to the subject . . . and will be an important contribution to our knowledge in this area. . . . It is comprehensive and well-structured with fascinating material and analysis.” —Peter Chelkowski, New York University “An innovative volume analyzing and instantiating the visual culture of a variety of Muslim societies [which] constitutes a substantially new object of study in the regional literature and one that creates productive links with history, anthropology, political science, art history, media studies, and urban studies, as well as area studies and Islamic studies.” —Walter Armbrust, University of Oxford |
| visual rhetoric: The Politics of the Superficial Brett Ommen, 2016-06-30 The Politics of the Superficial argues that the increasing volume of visually communicative surfaces in public life contributes to a very particular form of public imagination and political activity. |
| visual rhetoric: Techniques of Visual Persuasion Larry Jordan, 2020-07-29 In this remote-oriented, work-from-home world, persuasive communication is more important than ever. People do not read, they skim. Persuasive images that attract, hold, and motivate an audience are essential. Techniques of Visual Persuasion shows how to use images to grab the attention of the viewer long enough to powerfully share a message and move them to action. These techniques help you improve: Persuasive techniques Communication skills Business presentations Photos and images Videos and motion graphics To communicate clearly and effectively today, you need to consider how a message looks, as well as what a message says. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to create change. Also by Larry Jordan: Final Cut Pro Power Tips is packed with tips, techniques, shortcuts, and hidden gems, this book turns you into a video editing powerhouse. Available at Peachpit and major resellers today. |
| visual rhetoric: Writing Spaces Dana Driscoll, Matthew Vetter, 2020-03-07 Volumes in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing offer multiple perspectives on a wide range of topics about writing. In each chapter, authors present their unique views, insights, and strategies for writing by addressing the undergraduate reader directly. Drawing on their own experiences, these teachers-as-writers invite students to join in the larger conversation about the craft of writing. Consequently, each essay functions as a standalone text that can easily complement other selected readings in first year writing or writing-intensive courses across the disciplines at any level. Volume 3 continues the tradition of previous volumes with topics such as voice and style in writing, rhetorical appeals, discourse communities, multimodal composing, visual rhetoric, credibility, exigency, working with personal experience in academic writing, globalized writing and rhetoric, constructing scholarly ethos, imitation and style, and rhetorical punctuation. |
| visual rhetoric: Rhetorics of Display Lawrence J. Prelli, 2006 Rhetorics of Display is a pathbreaking volume that brings together adistinguished group of scholars to assess an increasingly pervasiveform of rhetorical activity. Editor Lawrence J. Prelli notes in hisintroduction that twenty-first century citizens continually confrontdisplays of information and images, from the verbal images ofspeeches and literature to visual images of film and photography toexhibits in museums to the arrangement of our homes to themerchandising of consumer goods. |
| visual rhetoric: Rhetoric of Logos Eduard Helmann, 2016-01-05 The author illustrates how designers can utilize the tools of rhetoric. |
| visual rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe Caroline Van Eck, 2007-08-27 In this book, Caroline van Eck examines how rhetoric and the arts interacted in early modern Europe. She argues that rhetoric, though originally developed for persuasive speech, has always used the visual as an important means of persuasion, and hence offers a number of strategies and concepts for visual persuasion as well. The book is divided into three major sections - theory, invention, and design. Van Eck analyzes how rhetoric informed artistic practice, theory, and perception in early modern Europe. |
| visual rhetoric: Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres Assimakis Tseronis, Charles Forceville, 2017-12-15 This collection advances the study of context-dependent characteristics of argumentative discourse by examining a variety of media genres in which text and image (and other semiotic modes) combine to create meaning. The chapters have been written by an international group of senior and junior scholars researching multimodal argumentation in the last two decades. In each chapter, a specific approach to argumentation and rhetoric is combined with insights from visual studies, metaphor theory, scientific visualization, cognitive science, semiotics, conversation analysis, or (documentary) film theory in order to explain how multimodal genres function argumentatively and rhetorically. Together the chapters present a state-of-the-art in the analysis of multimodal argumentation in such diverse genres as print advertisements, news photographs, scientific illustrations, political cartoons, documentaries, film trailers, political TV advertisements, public debates, and political speeches. The volume will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in argumentation studies, rhetoric, and multimodal communication. |
| visual rhetoric: Digital Rhetoric Douglas Eyman, 2015-06-01 A survey of a range of disciplines whose practitioners are venturing into the new field of digital rhetoric, examining the history of the ways digital and networked technologies inhabit and shape traditional rhetorical practices as well as considering new rhetorics made possible by current technologies |
| visual rhetoric: Buddhist Practice and Visual Culture Julie Gifford, 2011-03-16 This is the first study to provide an overall interpretation of the Buddhist monument Borobudur in Indonesia. Including both the narrative reliefs and the Buddha images, the book opens up a wealth of information on Mahayana Buddhist religious ideas and practices that could have informed Borobudur and it convincingly interprets Borobudur within that context. Presenting new material, the book contributes immensely to a new and better understanding of the significance of the Borobudur for the field of Buddhist and Religious Studies. |
| visual rhetoric: The Essential Guide to Visual Communication Ryan McGeough, 2019-02-06 The Essential Guide to Visual Communication is a concise introduction to the evolution, theory, and principles of visual communication in contemporary society. This guide helps students develop the skills they need to become critical consumers of visual media by examining images through the lens of visual rhetoric. Students see how images influence and persuade audiences, and how iconic images can be repurposed to communicate particular messages. Images selected and discussed throughout the text highlight examples of visual communication from earlier generations and the current digital environment that students encounter in their everyday lives. |
| visual rhetoric: Rhetorical Visions + What Every Student Should Know About Writing Across the Curriculum Wendy S. Hesford, Brenda Brueggemann, 2008-07-01 Rhetorical Visions is the visual reader with the most support for analytical writing. This thematic, visual reader uses rhetoric as the frame for investigating the verbal and visual texts of our culture. Rhetorical Visions is designed to help tap into the considerable rhetorical awareness that students already possess, in order to to help them put their insights into words in well-crafted academic papers and projects. In order to exercise their analytical reading and writing skills, Rhetorical Visions provides occasions for students to explore and apply key rhetorical concepts such as narrative, description, interpretation, genre, context, rhetorical appeals (ethos, logos, pathos), and memory to the analysis of print and non-print texts. |
| visual rhetoric: The Rhetoric of Perspective Hanneke Grootenboer, 2006-12-31 Perspective determines how we, as viewers, perceive painting. We can convince ourselves that a painting of a bowl of fruit or a man in a room appears to be real by the way these objects are rendered. Likewise, the trick of perspective can prevent us from being absorbed in a scene. Connecting contemporary critical theory with close readings of seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture, The Rhetoric of Perspective puts forth the claim that painting is a form of thinking and that perspective functions as the language of the image. Aided by a stunning full-color gallery, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes a new theory of perspective based on the phenomenological aspects of non-narrative still-life, trompe l'oeil, and anamorphic imagery. Drawing on playful and mesmerizing baroque images, Grootenboer characterizes what she calls their sophisticated deceit, asserting that painting is more about visual representation than about its supposed objects. Offering an original theory of perspective's impact on pictorial representation, the act of looking, and the understanding of truth in painting, Grootenboer shows how these paintings both question the status of representation and explore the limits and credibility of perception. “An elegant and honourable synthesis.”—Keith Miller, Times Literary Supplement |
| visual rhetoric: Type Matters Christopher Scott Wyatt, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, 2017-09-01 Pending |
| visual rhetoric: Humanizing Visual Design Charles Kostelnick, 2020-12-18 This book analyzes the role that human forms play in visualizing practical information and in making that information understandable, accessible, inviting, and meaningful to readers--in short, humanizing it. Although human figures have long been deployed in practical communication, their uses in this context have received little systematic analysis. Drawing on rhetorical theory, art history, design studies, and historical and contemporary examples, the book explores the many rhetorical purposes that human forms play in functional pictures, including empowering readers, narrating processes, invoking social and cultural identities, fostering pathos appeals, and visualizing data. The book is aimed at scholars, teachers, and practitioners in business, technical, and professional communication as well as an interdisciplinary audience in rhetoric, art and design, journalism, engineering, marketing, science, and history. |
| visual rhetoric: The Elements of Visual Analysis Marguerite H. Helmers, 2006 This brief, inexpensive paperback introduces students to the essential techniques and critical terms for analyzing and writing about visual culture. The Elements of Visual Analysis combines images, readings, and extensive definitions to develop students' abilities in analyzing two-dimensional and three-dimensional visual artifacts and experience. Designed primarily for courses in composition, rhetoric, and communications, the book will also fit any disciplines interested in engaging in serious analysis of visual phenomena. |
| visual rhetoric: The Art of Visual Exegesis Vernon K. Robbins, Walter S. Melion, Roy R. Jeal, 2017-04-28 A critical study for those interested in the intersection of art and biblical interpretation With a special focus on biblical texts and images, this book nurtures new developments in biblical studies and art history during the last two or three decades. Analysis and interpretation of specific works of art introduce guidelines for students and teachers who are interested in the relation of verbal presentation to visual production. The essays provide models for research in the humanities that move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries erected in previous centuries. In particular, the volume merges recent developments in rhetorical interpretation and cognitive studies with art historical visual exegesis. Readers will master the tools necessary for integrating multiple approaches both to biblical and artistic interpretation. Features Resources for understanding the relation of texts to artistic paintings and images Tools for integrating multiple approaches both to biblical and artistic interpretation Sixty images and fifteen illustrations |
| visual rhetoric: The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies Andrea A. Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, Rosa A. Eberly, 2008-10-29 The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies surveys the latest advances in rhetorical scholarship, synthesizing theories and practices across major areas of study in the field and pointing the way for future studies. Edited by Andrea A. Lunsford and Associate Editors Kirt H. Wilson and Rosa A. Eberly, the Handbook aims to introduce a new generation of students to rhetorical study and provide a deeply informed and ready resource for scholars currently working in the field. |
| visual rhetoric: Persuasive Games Ian Bogost, 2010-08-13 An exploration of the way videogames mount arguments and make expressive statements about the world that analyzes their unique persuasive power in terms of their computational properties. Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form procedural rhetoric, a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change these positions themselves, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and learning. |
| visual rhetoric: The Aesthetics of Self-Harm Zoe Alderton, 2018-05-11 The Aesthetics of Self-Harm presents a new approach to understanding parasuicidal behaviour, based upon an examination of online communities that promote performances of self-harm in the pursuit of an idealised beauty. The book considers how online communities provide a significant level of support for self-harmers and focuses on relevant case studies to establish a new model for the comprehension of the online supportive community. To do so, Alderton explores discussions of self-harm and disordered eating on social networks. She examines aesthetic trends that contextualise harmful behavior and help people to perform feelings of sadness and vulnerability online. Alderton argues that the traditional understanding of self-violence through medical discourse is important, but that it misses vital elements of human group activity and the motivating forces of visual imagery. Covering psychiatry and psychology, rhetoric and sociology, this book provides essential reading for psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists exploring group dynamics and ritual, and rhetoricians who are concerned with the communicative powers of images. It should also be of great interest to medical professionals dealing with self-harming patients. |
| visual rhetoric: Culture and Rhetoric Ivo Strecker, Stephen Tyler, 2009-07-01 While some scholars have said that there is no such thing as culture and have urged to abandon the concept altogether, the contributors to this volume overcome this impasse by understanding cultures and their representations for what they ultimately are – rhetorical constructs. These senior, international scholars explore the complex relationships between culture and rhetoric arguing that just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric. This intersection constitutes the central theme of the first part of the book, while the second is dedicated to the study of figuration as a common ground of rhetoric and anthropology. The book offers a compelling range of theoretical reflections, historical vistas, and empirical investigations, which aim to show how people talk themselves and others into particular modalities of thought and action, and how rhetoric and culture, in this way, are co-emergent. It thus turns a new page in the history of academic discourse by bringing two disciplines – anthropology and rhetoric – together in a way that has never been done before. |
| visual rhetoric: Handbook of Visual Communication Kenneth L. Smith, Sandra Moriarty, Keith Kenney, Gretchen Barbatsis, 2004-12-13 This Handbook of Visual Communication explores the key theoretical areas in visual communication, and presents the research methods utilized in exploring how people see and how visual communication occurs. With chapters contributed by many of the best-known and respected scholars in visual communication, this volume brings together significant and influential work in the visual communication discipline. The theory chapters included here define the twelve major theories in visual communication scholarship: aesthetics, perception, representation, visual rhetoric, cognition, semiotics, reception theory, narrative, media aesthetics, ethics, visual literacy, and cultural studies. Each of these theory chapters is followed by exemplar studies in the area, demonstrating the various methods used in visual communication research as well as the research approaches applicable for specific media types. The Handbook serves as an invaluable reference for visual communication theory as well as a useful resource book of research methods in the discipline. It defines the current state of theory and research in visual communication, and serves as a foundation for future scholarship and study. As such, it is required reading for scholars, researchers, and advanced students in visual communication, and it will be influential in other disciplines in which the visual component is key, including advertising, persuasion, and media studies. The volume will also be useful to practitioners seeking to understand the visual aspects of their media and the visual processes used by their audiences. |
| visual rhetoric: Visual Persuasion Paul Messaris, 1997 Paul Messaris is an extremely thoughtful commentator on the world of visuals. He has studied advertising visuals for many years and his insights are always stimulating and sometimes, even controversial. This book makes an important contribution to the literature in two fields: visual communication and advertising. I recommend it for faculty and students as well as professionals in the advertising field. --Sandra Moriarty, Professor University of Colorado With an informal writing style and examples both thoughtful and illustrative, Paul Messaris in his Visual Persuasion leads the reader through the often complex field of visual literacy related to advertising images with high style and intellect. When so much information is conveyed through quickly edited and carefully controlled mass media images, Visual Persuasion is a vital book toward understanding the impact on individuals, cultures, and society of persuasive visual messages. --Paul Martin Lester, Ph.D, Author of Visual Communication with Messages A smartly reasoned and elegantly written treatment of visual argumentation authored by one of America′s most respected authorities on visual communication. --James Lull The pictures in TV commercials, magazine ads, and other forms of advertising often convey meanings that cannot be expressed as well, or at all, through words or music. Visual Persuasion is an exploration of these unique aspects of advertising. By virtue of their ability to simulate the appearance of the physical world, pictures can become surrogate objects of desire or other emotions which ads subsequently associate with products. By exploiting viewers′ assumptions of a direct, automatic connection between photography and reality, images can serve as proof of advertising claims. Because of the implicit nature of visual argumentation and the relative lack of social accountability that images enjoy in comparison with words, pictures can be used to make advertising claims that would be unacceptable if they were spelled out verbally. Using these characteristics of visual persuasion as a starting point, this important book analyzes a variety of commercial, political, and social-issue advertisements. A separate chapter examines the role of pictures in cross-cultural advertising. Visual Persuasion is recommended for upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in communication and media studies. It also contains insights that will be valuable to students in courses in cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and advertising. |
| visual rhetoric: Constitutive Visions Christa J. Olson, 2013-11-15 In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments—as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity—struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state. |
Visual Rhetoric: Overview - Purdue OWL® - Purdue University
"Visual rhetoric" has been used to mean anything from the use of images as argument, to the arrangement of elements on a page for rhetorical effect, to the use of typography (fonts), and …
Visual rhetoric - Wikipedia
Visual rhetoric is the art of effective communication through visual elements such as images, typography, and texts. Visual rhetoric encompasses the skill of visual literacy and the ability to …
Examples of Visual Rhetoric: The Persuasive Use of Images
Apr 30, 2025 · Visual rhetoric is a branch of rhetorical studies concerned with the persuasive use of images, whether on their own or in the company of words.
What is Visual Rhetoric? - The Visual Communication Guy
Feb 13, 2014 · So what is Visual Rhetoric, Exactly? Visual rhetoric is part of a communication process where we interpret and make meaning out of the world around us. In other words, visual …
Chapter 12: Visual Rhetoric – Reading Rhetorical Theory
Although the rhetoric of visual culture changes dramatically over time, rhetoricans have pointed to several different kinds of visual rhetoric that shape Americans’ popular and political beliefs. …
Understanding Visual Rhetoric - Writing Center - Kennesaw State University
Visual rhetoric refers to any communicative moment where visuals (photographs, illustrations, cartoons, maps, diagrams, etc.) contribute to making meaning and displaying information.
Visual Rhetoric – Thinking Rhetorically: Writing for Professional …
Visual rhetoric is a form of rhetoric that uses visual information—photographs, drawings, symbols, charts, maps, color, shapes, typography, white space—to communicate, to create meaning, or, …
Visual Rhetoric - Communication - Oxford Bibliographies
Jul 28, 2021 · There is no consensus on the definition of visual rhetoric; different scholars use the term in different ways. Broadly, it refers to the analysis of the communicative and persuasive …
What Is Visual Rhetoric? Exploring Its Powerful Impact
Jul 6, 2024 · Visual rhetoric is a powerful form of communication that can inform, motivate, or persuade an audience. Visual communicators must consider audience, purpose, and context …
Visual Rhetoric – Visual Communication - University System of …
Visual rhetoric draws upon the rhetorical traditions found in oral and written rhetoric and operates to achieve the same effect on human perception. Humans communicate using a combination of …
Visual Rhetoric: Overview - Purdue OWL® - Purdue Unive…
"Visual rhetoric" has been used to mean anything from the use of images as argument, to the arrangement of elements on a page for rhetorical …
Visual rhetoric - Wikipedia
Visual rhetoric is the art of effective communication through visual elements such as images, typography, and texts. Visual rhetoric …
Examples of Visual Rhetoric: The Persuasive Use of Imag…
Apr 30, 2025 · Visual rhetoric is a branch of rhetorical studies concerned with the persuasive use of images, whether on their own or in the …
What is Visual Rhetoric? - The Visual Communication Guy
Feb 13, 2014 · So what is Visual Rhetoric, Exactly? Visual rhetoric is part of a communication process where we interpret and make meaning out of …
Chapter 12: Visual Rhetoric – Reading Rhetorical Theory
Although the rhetoric of visual culture changes dramatically over time, rhetoricans have pointed to several different kinds of visual rhetoric that …
