Visual Rhetoric: If You See Something, Write Something

Catalog description

In the 21st century with the advent of varying technologies and a proliferation of social media, meaning-making and meaning-deciphering demand a deliberate and artful interweaving of visual habits, rhetorical strategies, and subjective positionings within the act of interlocution (FleckensteinVision, Rhetoric). Said in a different way, one must concurrently exercise visual knowledge, textual know-how, and audience sensitivity to understand meaning and to convey one’s ideas successfully in a world where the alphabetic and the optic converge to make things happen. In this course, students will recall how the ideas of John Berger, Walter Ong, and Marshal McLuhan forecasted our current relationships between literacy, visual culture, and technology. We will explore how current artists, such as Wan-gechi Mutu, Patrisse Cullors, and Nao Bustamente, use their craft to explore the interrelationships between knowledge and the means of conveying messages; equally, we will investigate how certain academic opportunities have emerged that offer new possibilities for intellectual production (i.e., digital dissertations, online journals). We will read writ-ers/artists who have confronted the challenges of visual culture and have risked genre-bending (For example: Claudia Rankine; Lynda Barry; Maia Kobabe). We will divine how these burgeoning contexts might change the classroom and education more broadly (think Cathy Davidson). Most importantly for the participants in this course, these inquiries will demand that we challenge our own creative abilities to compose with divergent sets of practices, media, and in-sights. Participants will do both low-stakes and high-stakes pieces of experimental critical composing that merge the visual, digital, aural, and performative (. . . maybe also the gustatory, olfactory, and haptic.)