observes, new media change what it means for their users to be human. When “a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world,” he writes, “[T]hen new ratios among all our senses occur” (41).
Communicators in the age of hypertext are undergoing, in Lanham’s words, a “readjustment of the alphabet/image ration.” And one of the most transformative potentials of digital technology, according to Lanham, is to “dissolve before our eye [. . .] the disciplinary boundaries that currently govern academic study of the arts” (13). Indeed, “the same volatility” that is shaking rhetoric’s edifice “dissolves the boundaries between the arts”: the shock we may experience upon encountering new computer technologies suggests the profundity of the change only beginning to occur in the “digital metamorphoses of the arts and letters” (13). Teachers of composition and communication who do not intend to obstruct the transformation that Lanham describes should, ideally, be as skilled in the use of hypertext as the average 18-year-old entering our classrooms. At the very least, we must acquire to the best of our abilities the skills needed to interpret and to create images and sounds and to integrate them electronically with discourse.
Understandably, however, writing teachers may be reluctant to revise pedagogies to reflect a focus on composing in digital environments. We may fear, for instance, that time dedicated to the visual will be time taken from writing—that we may be guilty of “dumbing down” the curriculum if we do not focus exclusively on discourse. That we have been trained to discuss words rather than pictures contributes to our reluctance to introduce images into the curriculum. In Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, W. J. T. Mitchell describes a “fear” that English studies historically has had of images—namely, that their presence will diminish the laboriously constructed superiority of the word as signifier. Yet reading time need not be affected by our including visual texts among the verbal texts we assign students, and writing time need not be affected at all. Our composition students typically are exposed to a wide variety of genres and rhetorical situations, and many of our most widely used writing textbooks, mirroring the texts students encounter in their daily lives, already incorporate images. Our students read, discuss, and write about not only belletristic essays but also visually enhanced advertising, journalism, Internet writing, and, in WAC classrooms, forms of quite specialized communication. Advanced writing classes often focus on such technically complex forms, which conventionally incorporate the visual. Viewed in light of institutional situations, consideration of visual texts in the writing classroom may seem an unremarkable development.
Students are much more likely than we are to be immersed in visual culture and to feel comfortable talking and writing about what they see. As each of the teachers we worked with in creating this anthology has discovered, bringing the visual forward can intensify student engagement with assignments. Teachers of English who make the visual a salient theme may find that students who recognize how an image can persuade may be better able to articulate what constitutes written persuasion or even argument; these students likely will grasp, at the very least, that the distance between visual and written cultures is less vast than they had imagined. Some eventually may intuit that an argument can be conceptualized as an image composed in the mind of the writing subject; for, as Mitchell notes in regard to the discourse-focused epistemological tradition of our discipline, there is a “counter tradition which conceives of interpretation as going in just the opposite direction, from a verbal surface to the ‘vision’ that lies behind it [. . .], from the linear recitation of the text to the ‘structures’ or ‘forms’ that control its order” (Iconology 45). Indeed we are all familiar by now with the etymology of theory.
What Mitchell’s Art Forum article labeled the “pictorial turn” is underway. With Porter’s forecast and the goals of rhetorical education and critical pedagogy in mind, we offer this anthology in the hope of better equipping colleagues and students to grapple with the diverse texts they encounter in daily life.
Cultural Studies
In 1972, psychologist Rudolf Arnheim asserted in his groundbreaking book Visual Thinking that the visual is the “primary medium of thought” (18). The cognitive process, according to Arnheim, begins with identification of familiar objects, and concepts subsequently take form out of the subject’s lived experience and knowledge. More recently, Ann Marie Seward Barry examines emotional reactions to the visual and extends Arnheim’s work. She explains in Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication that our reactions to the visual are our first reactions—that “we begin to respond emotionally to situations before we can think them through” (18).
Barry indicates not only that visual images automatically evoke a stronger emotional reaction than discourse does, but also that our emotions make us especially receptive to images gratifying our preferences in art and design and in ideology. Attraction to the form of an image may lead us to accept its content indiscriminately because analysis would entail an extended, and at times irksome, process of thought. Hill and Helmers concur (33): “cultural studies,” they note, “constitute one type of attempt to understand how visual appeals operate” (26). Not surprisingly, the power of images is of concern to many teachers committed to critical pedagogy.
Art historian E. H. Gombrich argues in Art and Illusion a central assumption of visual critique in English studies—namely, that culture influences how we see. His exposition of the history of artistic styles illustrates his thesis regarding the cultural position of the painter: what matters is “not a faithful record of a visual experience but the faithful construction of a relational mode” (78), and the painter’s problem is one of “conjuring up a convincing image” (45). Gombrich cites, as one of many examples of the influence of culture on art, the landscape paintings of John Constable, whose familiarity with new methods of studying cloud formation may have made his innovative representations of the sky possible (20). Presumably it was because of his immersion in this cultural change that Constable was able to “break through” the artistic conventions of his day. According to Gombrich, such breakthroughs by “exceptional beings” mark changes in artistic style and tradition and are understood best in their cultural contexts (20). After being introduced to the works of painters such as Joseph Turner, Vasily Kandinsky, or Georgia O’Keefe, students of writing might explore the influence of cultural context and material conditions on the contributions of pivotal artists. Students might also gain insight into these issues by exploring the homelier industrial arts, as Maureen Daly Goggin does in her account of transformations in the situation of embroidery work during the print and Protestant revolutions.
Art critic John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is a short and highly readable critique of painting and commercial reproductions that is based on his 1970 BBC series on art. The author (and collaborators he names as helping to “make” [5] the book) asks what essential change occurs when original artwork is transformed into a reproduction. His response is “commercialization,” and his definition of image conforms to his thesis regarding the reproduction of art. Image, for Berger, is a “sight which has been recreated or reproduced” (9).
Ways of Seeing demonstrates that commercialization was a part of the early history of painting in the West, but on a smaller scale than occurs today. Although much of the value of an original painting derives ultimately from its ability to bring viewers close to the (usually dead) artist and the painting’s (often recondite) context, paintings have, from the beginning, belonged to the culture of the rich, whose portraits often have featured their material possessions (their clothing, buildings, elaborate gardens and grounds, and the “intimate” rooms of their homes) and evoked mythological themes investing the owners with heroic qualities.
Through reproductions, “great art” has entered the mainstream, but without training or educational support the general public has remained largely uninterested in “high” culture (33). Berger posits that, in its place, advertisements of glamorous lifestyles and locales are consumed by a mass audience that dreams of being rich. In representing wealth and luxury, advertisements often allude to painting styles (138). Fashion and beauty photography, for example, often mimics poses and settings of eighteenth and nineteenth
