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Notes
By “minor” I do not mean unimportant. I use the term in the musical sense: a theme apart from the major theme, but one that is still identifiable, recurrent, and relatively distinct within a piece of music.
On visual argument see the two‐volume special issue of Argumentation and Advocacy 33 (Summer–Fall 1996), ed. David Birdsell and Leo Groarke. On visual rhetoric in graphic design, see Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl, “Doubly Damned: Rhetorical and Visual,” Visible Language 32 (1998): 200–233. On visual rhetoric and advertising, see Linda M. Scott, “Images in Advertising: The Need for a Theory of Visual Rhetoric,” Journal of Consumer Research 21 (1994): 252–273. Use of the term “visual rhetoric” is not confined to scholarship. Undergraduate textbooks in argumentation, rhetoric, and composition feature exercises in visual rhetoric or “visual argument.” Such exercises typically encourage the idea of visual literacy (a concept critiqued by James Elkins; see this essay). See, for example, Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer, Good Reasons With Contemporary Arguments (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2001) and Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau, Current Issues and Enduring Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking and Argument, With Readings, 6th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002).
See Charles Hill and Marguerite Helmers, eds., Defining Visual Rhetorics (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), which includes contributions from composition and speech communication rhetoricians.
An initial attempt at a comprehensive literature review is Keith Kenney and Linda M. Scott, “A Review of the Visual Rhetoric Literature,” in Persuasive Imagery: A Consumer Response Perspective, ed. Linda M. Scott and Rajeev Batra (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003), 17–56. Kenney and Scott survey 172 sources and sort them into three different critical categories, which they somewhat strangely label classical, Burkeian, and “critical” (their quotation marks). One conclusion they draw is that most rhetorical studies of visuality do not investigate the empirical effects of images on readers and viewers; I do not dispute this, but I am not convinced that the empirical study of image effects is the necessary domain of a project in visual rhetoric. The first book‐length attempt designed to clarify the idea of visual rhetoric in the domain of rhetorical studies is Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Hill and Helmers.
Note that each of these scholars works out of Chicago (Mitchell and Stafford at the University of Chicago, Elkins at the School of the Art Institute), a city that has embraced its visual culture perhaps more consciously than any other U.S. city. Perhaps we have a new “Chicago School”? I thank J. Gardner Rogers for suggesting this point.
I hesitate to say “interdisciplinary,” given the promiscuous and often problematic use of the term. On the problem of interdisciplinarity, see W. J. T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 540–544, and James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003), 25–30.
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture,” 540.
To date, Elkins has published 15 books since 1994. At least two more are in press at the time of writing.
W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1.
In particular, this is a feature of some visual argument scholarship that considers the question of the existence of visual argument by isolating the visual from the textual. See David Fleming, “Can Pictures Be Arguments?” Argumentation and Advocacy 33 (Summer 1996): 11–22.
Recent scholarly attention to the question of circulation helps us see beyond the need to “fix” meaning. See Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books), 220–224; Bruno Latour, “How to Be Iconophilic in Art, Science, and Religion?” in Picturing Science–Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 418–440; Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 49–90. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites's ongoing project on iconic photography depends on an implicit theory of circulation; see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management in a Liberal‐Democratic Society: The Kent State Iconic Photograph,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (2001): 5–32; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm,’” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 35–66.
Popular readers include Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds., Visual Culture: The Reader (London: Sage, 1999); Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 1998). A recent and popular introductory textbook is Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
I count myself guilty as charged. See Finnegan, Picturing Poverty, ix, 220.
See Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); and Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
On this point, see also Cara A. Finnegan, “Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual: The Photograph and the Archive,” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, 197.
A vivid and oft‐cited example of the contested nature of the term “visual culture” may be found in the journal October's infamous “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” October 77 (1996): 25–70.
Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity,” 543.
To offer but a few examples: Kevin M. DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demo, “Imaging Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 241–260; Hariman and Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management”; Hariman and Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory”; Lester C. Olson, Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Lester C. Olson, Benjamin Franklin's Vision of American Community: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).
Kevin M. DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples attempt this in their work on the “public screen,” but in arguing for the relevance of spectacle to public discourse, they oversimplify contemporary public sphere theory, reducing it to a straw figure in order to make an argument about the importance of paying attention to visuality. As a result, they come close to reifying a view of visuality as antithetical to “rational,” textual publicity. See Kevin M. DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 125–151.
See Robert Hariman, “Allegory and Democratic Public Culture in the Postmodern Era,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 267–296; James P. McDaniel, “Liberal Irony: A Program for Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 297–327.