Intellectual and Conceptual Resources for Visual Rhetoric: A Re-examination of Scholarship Since 1950

Abstract

This essay articulates a history of visual rhetoric scholarship during the last half century by describing the nomenclature employed by speech and communication researchers for designating germane scholarship, by specifying some landmark moments, and by identifying recurring patterns in the intellectual and conceptual resources. Because the pluralism of definition and emphasis are invaluable for ongoing projects in visual rhetoric, the essay is less concerned with identifying a center that holds visual rhetoric together than focal points for substantive conversations and dialogues to advance current visual rhetoric scholarship. The conclusion suggests some open-ended questions concerning components of one overarching question: How might the study of visual rhetoric be better institutionalized within colleges and universities in the United states?

Notes

1. Numerous wampum belts are reproduced in photographic records available in microfilm (Jennings, 1985). Their ritual uses are discussed at length by an eighteenth-century American colonist, whose depictions reflect a white, British American's understandings of them (Colden, 1727/1755).

2. This essay is derived from a conference paper presented on a panel entitled “Sizing Up Visual Rhetoric Scholarship” at a meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, Memphis, TN, during May 2006. The theme of the conference was “Sizing Up Rhetoric.”

3. Barry Brummett's 1985 book review of Medhurst's and Benson's anthology, which Brummett characterized as “a collection of media criticism done from a rhetorical perspective” (p. 272), suggests noteworthy institutional factors in colleges and universities at the time of its initial publication.

4. For instance, the central objective of the 1971 Report was expressly to call for a shift in the very definition of rhetoric scholarship away from featuring the types of artifacts or media studied toward concentrating instead on the perspectives taken toward the artifacts or media. The collaborative statement advocated “a shift in traditional emphases” in scholars’ definitions of rhetoric scholarship, from featuring the nature of the “material studied to identifying it by the nature of the critic's inquiry” (Sloan et al., 1971, p. 220).

5. Materials pertaining to Gran Fury's poster and other graphic works pertaining to AIDS activism may be found in Crimp and Rolston (1990, p. 56).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lester C. Olson

Lester C. Olson is Professor of Communication and Women's Studies at the Department of Communication of the University of Pittsburgh