Topic: Visual Rhetorics

"Not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do
anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else.  The reason
is that [sight], most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light
many differences between things."
				- Aristotle, Metaphysica, 980a
"Visibility is a trap."
				- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Some, like W.J.T. Mitchell, suggest that the "visual turn" has replaced
the "linguistic" turn in recent years, and certainly the cottage industry
of historical, critical and theoretical work on visuality, visual culture,
technologies of vision, specularity, the gaze, scopic regimes,
ocular-centrism, etc. would seem to support the claim.  Such a shift --
implicated as it is by the tension between the quotations from Aristotle
and Foucault cited above -- raises interesting and complex questions about
the relationship between rhetoric (understood broadly as the capacity of
language-in-action to constitute being and identity towards the ends of
social and political interaction) and consciousness, both in theory and in
practice. In what sense(s) do the relationships between visual rhetorics,
verbal-visual rhetorics, and ocularcentric rhetorics correspond to the
experience of social and political consciousness at particular moments in
time?  And what, if anything, is the governing experience of the
relationship between rhetoric and the visual in late modern society?  How
does the metaphor of the "text" -- grounded in a hermeneutics of "reading"
-- effect our experience and understanding of visual rhetoric?  Or
alternately, how does the metaphor of the "visual" implicate our
understanding of knowledge and meaning?  Further, how does the
"materiality" of the seeing experience impact upon our rhetorical
consciousness?  Does architecture or city planning require different
hermeneutical or rhetorical strategies than cinematography or documentary
photography?  Paintings?  Museums and monuments?  Personal scrapbooks?
The performativity of speechmaking?

In this seminar we will address the above and related questions both
historically and conceptually as we strive to identify the problems and
possibilities of visual rhetorics in the contemporary world.  We will
begin by briefly examining how rhetoric and the visual have been
articulated at several key moments in their respective histories from
classical antiquity to the present.  We will then turn our attention to
recent efforts to theorize the relationship between rhetoric and the
visual, paying careful attention to both the representational systems (or
discourses) within which visual culture is constituted and experienced,
and to the ways in which such systems/discourses are implicated by
differences of nation, class, race, ethnicity, age, gender, and sexuality.
Throughout, we will have reference to the ways in which visual rhetorics
play a key role in contemporary American social and political
controversies.

Course readings will cover the gamut from classical antiquity to the
renaissance to the twentieth century,  but will emphasize contemporary
efforts to theorize the relationship between rhetoric and the visual as it
is constituted and experienced in late modern society.  Members of the
seminar will be expected to write a series of position papers  (3-4 pp.)
on class readings and to prepare a seminar paper (15-20 pp.) in which they
address the problematics and readings of the course in their own study of
an instance of "visual rhetoric."

Students may also enroll for this course as C701 Seminar in Cultural
Studies or G751 Seminar in American Studies.