People in the Field
Because the field of visual rhetoric is so vast, there have been many people that have influnced the field. Anyone from cavemen to young children to film makers, who ever has put visual and verbal art together or used visual art to represent verbal has had a part in the field of visual rhetoric. Listed below are a few people and their profession within the relm of visual rhetoric.
Carolyn Handa
English Professor at the University of Alabama in the Composition, Rhetoric, and English Studies Program
Lester Faigley
English Professor at the University of Texas at Austin where he is the Director of Rhetoric and Composition
Marguerite Helmers
Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
In the listserve I am following, Marguerite Helmers made a post about visual rhetoric that I thought was good. I would provide the link but I’m not sure if you can access it unless you are subscribed to it. So here it is. I have just copied and pasted it directly as she wrote it and the link is under it for source reasons.
“Visual culture studies and visual rhetoric have been increasing areas of emphasis in scholarly studies. Drawing on the work of a variety of theorists, from Kenneth Burke in rhetorical studies to Roland Barthes in semiotics, and addressing a wide range of subjects, from supermarkets to new media, scholars established visual cultural studies as a thriving and significant area of inquiry for the new century. The impetus for such study has been the awareness that Americans’ primary information sources (television and the World Wide Web) are strongly graphic (or visual) rather than print- or text-based in nature. This series will encourage scholars working in rhetoric, cultural studies, and communication to create new scholarly works that analyze visual phenomena. The intent is to assist in the development of a dedicated publication venue for visual rhetorical studies in order to establish coherence in what is currently a disparate discipline.
“The previously unquestioned hegemony of verbal text is being challenged by what W. J. T. Mitchell labels the “pictorial turn” (Picture Theory)-a recognition of the importance and ubiquity of images in the dissemination and reception of information, ideas, and opinions-processes that lie at the heart of all rhetorical practices, social movements, and cultural institutions. In the past decade, many scholars have called for collaborative ventures, in essence for disciplining of the study of visual information into a new field, variously labeled visual rhetoric, visual culture studies, or “image studies.” This proposed new field would bring together the work currently being accomplished by scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, including art theory, anthropology, rhetoric, cultural studies, psychology, and media studies.”
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=133249
Prof. Sandra Moriarty
“Visual communication involves understanding a wide variety of activities central both to the perception of messages as well as to the construction of them. Serious study of the world of visuals, like the study of literature, music, and other forms of art, can contribute to the student’s understanding of the world of human expression. In
general terms, the primary goal of this course is to develop habits of analysis and criticism as well as techniques of mass media message development in order to better understand the contributions of visual media to human communication.”
http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/vcsyllabus.html
According to Mitchell, “ekphrastic fear is the moment of resistance or counter desire that occurs when we sense that the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually.” Mitchell leads readers through specific discussions of Williams, Keats, Stevens and especially Shelley, reading the manuscript poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery” into his argument. Of this poem he says, “If ekphrasis, as a verbal representation of a visual representation, is an attempt to repress or ‘take dominion’ over language’s graphic Other, then Shelley’s Medusa is the return of that repressed image, teasing us out of thought with a vengeance.” In discussing this poem Mitchell argues that gender is one among many figures of difference that energize the dialectic of the imagetext. Mitchell (like Murray Krieger) suggest that ekphrastic digressions aim to be all of literature in miniature. Mitchell thinks that ekphrasis is “one of the keys to difference within language (both ordinary and literary) and that it focuses the interarticulation of perceptual, semiotic, and social contradictions within verbal representation.” (Jean Jacobson.)
http://mh.cla.umn.edu/txtimjj6.html
The people that I found were
Paul Martin Lester, Ph.D. wrote a book entitled Visual Communication: Images with Messages
This is the only text to offer substantial coverage of issues specific to all forms of visual communication. It helps students analyze visual messages using a technique similar to the one used to evaluate words. It offers physiological and theoretical background on visual perception, then moves to discussion of various media (including typography, graphic design, informational graphics, photography, television, video, and interactive media) and the very visible role they play in our lives.
Lester Faigley- is professor of English and director of Rhetoric and compositions at the University of Texas
Wrote Visual Rhetoric: Literary by design – written for a speaker series.
Gloria Betcher- Worked with Faigley on this Speaker series
Charles A. Hill- he wrote a book entitled Defining Visual Rhetoric