texts, and assignments for students of first-year writing. Christine Alfano and Alyssa O’Brien’s Envision: Persuasive Writing in a Visual World teaches these same students to analyze and to understand visual texts as essential to effective writing. And Lester Faigley, Diana George, Anna Palchick, and Cynthia Selfe’s Picturing Texts provides suggestions for students evaluating and producing visual artifacts.
In our classrooms, when we have offered discussions and assignments invoking painting, architecture, sculpture, and photography, most students have accepted these subjects readily. When creating writing assignments and discussion topics for classes in composition, rhetorical analysis, cultural studies, and professional and technical writing, we have supplied students with materials from art books and from museum websites. Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception offers chapters on the elements of visual composition and contains many examples that could be of use to teachers contemplating assignments along similar lines.
Titles of books on women, both as artists and as models, are included in David’s article “Investitures of Power.” Paintings of women by the Pre-Raphaelites (who worshipped female beauty while treating their beautiful wives and models carelessly), as well as other well-known portraits and their contexts, will interest students, as we have found, and may motivate them to bring in favorite reproductions of their own. Assignments drawing on the history of portraiture style might ask students to find family pictures, old and new, in order to analyze the expressions and configurations of sitters, or to examine the styles of portraiture in different cultural and historic contexts. Figure 3 presents very different photographic representations of couples from the mid-eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries; these juxtapositions suggest that popular styles of intimate portraiture are influenced by artistic conventions.
Helpful sources for teachers conducting discussions and creating writing assignments around photography are Lemagny and Ruille’s A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives and The History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall, both of which present a history of photographic styles. And many early images now are available on the Web. As Institutional Repositories (such as Emory University’s
Library-of-Congress-funded Meta-Archive of Southern Culture) go online, students with access to the Internet will have virtually limitless accessibility to the gamut of photographic genres. In addition to researching such archives, students might bring in pictures from their own “galleries” to analyze.
Recently, one of us taught a special-topics first-year composition course focusing on visual rhetoric. Students discussed and wrote about images including those that appeared in traveling photography exhibits, which many postsecondary institutions, including our own, house regularly. The WebCT post appearing in Figure 4 reproduces text written by Katie Jezghani after a visit to the Kennesaw State University campus exhibit “Beggars and Choosers: Motherhood is Not a Class Privilege in America.” Jezghani and her classmates had been assigned to choose one photograph in the exhibit to describe and to analyze in terms of Ryan Jervings’s rubric “Thirteen Ways to Read a Black-and-White Photograph,” which appears later in this book.
Students can also benefit from opportunities to write about the visual as part of a more materially complex and paratextually informed situation, that is, as signs appearing in grocery stores (Dickinson and Maugh), gardens (Lambert and Martinez), homes (Tange), suburbs (Robbins), and a great variety of public and private spaces.
Drawing extensively on the tradition of the ancients, the first chapter of our collection, Nancy Allen’s “Seeing Rhetoric: A Foundational Approach,” highlights the complementarities between verbal and visual modes of communication. Using a variety of professional examples to support her explanation, Allen catalogues the visual applications of the rhetorical appeals, canon, and triangle and provides a solid working model for writing teachers who wish to introduce students to the elements of visual rhetoric.
“Mediated Memory: The Language of Memorial Space” describes how L. J. Nicoletti’s students studied a site that was of special interest to them and then designed and wrote a text justifying the creation of a new memorial. Nicoletti focuses on the fourth canon of rhetoric by deconstructing the “seeming rhetorical sanctity” of this architectural form and asks students to consider issues such as rhetorical purpose, context, and audience in light of memorial architecture, as well as the goals of inclusiveness (remembrance) and originality. Developed in the aftermath of 9/11, her approach demonstrates how writing projects incorporating the visual can resonate in students’ lives.
Barbara Worthington and Deborah Rard’s “Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers: Using Documentary Film in Classroom Instruction” describes the authors’ film-based methods for teaching the principles of rhetorical analysis to first-year students. By thoughtfully viewing a documentary containing a narrative of a fatal drunk-driving accident, students develop awareness of rhetoric’s terms and functions. The chapter includes an analysis of student discussions of visual arguments arising from and directed at viewers in different socioeconomic contexts.
C. Richard King’s chapter, “Envisioning Justice: Racial Metaphors, Political Movements, and Critical Pedagogy,” describes an advanced writing unit on race, social justice, and culture. Asserting that white supremacy is a “structured field of vision no less than systems of economic, political, and social relations,” King examines how “metaphors, analogies, and juxtapositions” buttress racialization. His chapter also highlights the complexities raised by the images, slogans, and advertisements of social organizations invoking victimization.
Jane Davis wrote “Seeing the Unspeakable: Emmett Till and American Terrorism” in response to the fiftieth anniversary of the lynching of Till, a 14-year-old African-American who was gruesomely tortured and murdered by white men for whistling at one of their wives. Horrific photographs of Till maimed in his coffin brought home the reality of racist violence and outraged people across the United States, helping give force to the nascent Civil Rights Movement. Davis illustrates both the power of visual media and the role of images in perpetuating and combating racism.
“A Study of Photographs of Iran: Postcolonial Inquiry into the Limits of Visual Representation,” by Iraj Omidvar, notes that in the United States visual representations of Muslims generally and of Iranians specifically have been ubiquitous—and negative—since 9/11. Yet countering these visual stereotypes without resorting to an objectivist stance requires a commitment to teacher-student dialogue in the spirit of Socratic elenchos. Omidvar suggests that teachers and students trace the roots of racist images by engaging in research designed to illuminate the material bases of stereotyping.
Yong-Kang Wei’s chapter, “Ethos on the Web: A Cross-Cultural Approach,” highlights differences between rhetorics of “East” and “West.” After identifying key concepts of classical Western rhetoric and providing an overview of classical Chinese rhetoric as it occurs in speech, architecture, landscape, and document design, Wei demonstrates how Chinese hypertext reflects its cultural and rhetorical traditions. His chapter has served as a provocative starting point for courses addressing cross-cultural professional communication.
Jean Darcy describes in “Christopher Columbus’s Maps: Visualizing Discovery” a project exemplifying Mitchell’s analysis of the verbal-visual relation. Her assignments for courses, from beginning to advanced, require students not only to use maps and textual sources in extrapolating the critical thinking processes of Columbus in his “New World” voyages but also to investigate their own methods of learning and knowing. Her original assignment is open to a variety of artifacts and could be
