Journals
The following are journals that focus on visual rhetoric as a subject. Listed with the jounal title is also a link to the journals website as well as a quick overview of what the journal is about, taken directly from the journals’ homepages.
Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture
“Enculturation is a refereed journal devoted to contemporary theories of rhetoric, writing, and culture. We accept academic work in all media forms suitable for web-based publication, including conventional articles, hypertexts, videos, and multimedia projects. Submitted articles and projects are blind-reviewed and considered for publication on the understanding that they are not under consideration elsewhere. Traditional articles should be approximately 4000-6000 words long, reviews 1000-2000 words. We also invite unsolicited reviews for books, CDs, films, websites, media events, and conferences.
“Enculturation 2.0 attempts to keep the traditional feel and usability of the print journal with issues, tables of contents, and articles, while integrating the functionality of blogs and social networking sites. Users can navigate and read articles without logging in as on any standard website; can register to set a profile, post comments, submit links, and list their blogs on our aggregator; or can register and request permission to set up a blog on Enculturation’s site. The nature of knowledge production is changing and the concept of the journal needs to hang on to what is important about its traditional practices as well as move into the new technological era.
“Enculturation as a concept is the process of teaching an individual the norms and values of a culture through unconscious repetition. The totality of actions within a culture establishes a context that sets the conditions for what is possible within the society. Learning in this context becomes a life-long process developed through rhetoric in the form of speech, texts, images, and gestures that reaffirm the technological, economic, political, social, ideological, and philosophical bases of the culture.”
Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture
“This journal is dedicated to explorations of the material and political dimensions of cultural practices: the means by which cultural objects and communities are produced, the historical contexts in which they emerge, and the regimes of knowledge or modes of social interaction to which they contribute. As the title suggests, Invisible Culture problematizes the unquestioned alliance between culture and visibility, specifically visual culture and vision. Cultural practices and materials emerge not solely in the visible world, but also in the social, temporal, and theoretical relations that define the invisible. Our understanding of Cultural Studies, finally, maintains that culture is fugitive and is constantly renegotiated.”
http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/ivchome.html
Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture
“We created Images because we saw a void in the market place. Most film journals concentrate on recent movies, occasionally including an article about movies of the past, but more likely than not, confined exclusively to the most recent releases. And movie magazines that do feature articles on the past, usually offer few insights into why a particular movie or actor grabbed our attention. More likely than not they simply recycle articles that flatly and plainly describe an actor or director’s experience with a certain studio or with a certain project, but offering no insights into why that actor or director was worthy of discussing in the first place. With this approach, all artists are equally important. Why? Because they exist. Well, we aren’t happy with that approach. We want to understand the world we live in. We want to understand why a particular actress appealed to the audience. Or why a particular movie has remained a vital part of our culture while other movies of the same time period (possibly more popular ones in their time) have faded away. We believe in questioning our surroundings. In short, Images is for people who don’t just passively watch movies.”
I really like the journal Images. It focuses on visual rhetoric from more of a film point of view. They had one article that was written by Vicki Eaklor called “Striking Cords and Touching Nerves: Myth and Gender in Gone With the Wind.” I enjoyed reading it. The article discusses the all the things that were gained in the transition from novel to movie. It looks at things from masculine and famine gender roles, the deep connection between Scarlett and her beloved Tara, Scarlett in the mists of war, and the famous ending of the movie. The article looks at all of these from a visual prospective. Seeing these events occur rather than just reading about them brings so much more meaning to them. The article makes a point I really like in that:
“In every crisis, Scarlett returns to Tara, regardless of the risks involved (after the Battle of Atlanta, for example). As the film ends, her final realization is that she must return to her home, her agrarian roots. That Scarlett views Rhett’s departure as a tragedy encapsulates the conflicts within her feminine identity previously discussed; that to her Tara promises relief, comfort, and a chance to think (even if it’s about the dubious cause of getting Rhett back) reverberates in audiences well trained in the agrarian myth; that a woman personifies characteristics and events consciously or unconsciously considered male, though, creates disorder within potential harmony.”
If you would like to read more of this article you can find it at: http://www.imagesjournal.com/2002/features/gwtw/
In Enculturation, Robert Miltner wrote an article called “Where the Visual Meets the Verbal: Collaboration as Conversation.” In the article, Miltner makes a brilliant observation by when he says, “Collaborations between verbal and visual artists produce such insights, regardless of whether the poet responds to the painter or the painter to the poet, since each is speaking in turn in the artistic dialogue which collaboration produces.” I really like this quote because of the truth behind it. No matter what the visual or what the verbal is, the two pieces are independent of each other even if created together. Although they make each other better, they can in fact stand alone and support themselves as individual forms of art.
If you would like to read the rest of this article, you can locate it at: http://enculturation.gmu.edu/3_2/miltner/index.html
Across the Disciplines was a journal I found. It had studies and arguments on visual rhetoric and where it is going.
Across the Disciplines is the result of a merger between two peer-reviewed, academic journals: Language and Learning Across the Disciplines and Academic.Writing. The mission of Academic.Writing, an online journal that was published from 2000 through 2003, was to provide information for – and an opportunity for interaction among – scholars interested in writing, speaking, and otherwise communicating across the curriculum (CAC). Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, a print journal published from 1994 to 2003, was a more traditional journal that focused on writing in the disciplines. In late 2002, when Academic.Writing shifted from being the “container” for the WAC Clearinghouse and became, instead, one of the publications available on the newer WAC Clearinghouse Web site, the scope of the journal shifted from a repository of all forms of information about communication across the curriculum to a more standard academic journal.
Like Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, Across the Disciplines provides CAC researchers, program designers, and teachers interested in using communication assignments and activities in their courses with a venue for scholarly debate about issues of disciplinarity and writing across the curriculum. ATD also preserves the broader commitment to cross-disciplinary emphases in writing studies that characterized Academic.Writing. As was the case with Academic.Writing, ATD eschews the conventional volume/issue format of print and many online journals. Instead, ATD will continue to function as an evolving, growing document (or, more accurately, a collection of documents) on the Web. As such, articles and other materials will be published as they are accepted. At regular intervals, we will make announcements about new materials in the journal.
http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/about.cfm