Visual Rhetoric Course Projects

Elaine Burklow--"Illuminating Christine de Pisan"

For my final project, I will be creating a web page. I am working with William Caxton's translation of Christine de Pisan's book Fayttes of Armes and of Chyualrye, which was published in1489, and reprinted in 1932 by A.T.P. Byles. I will be focusing on two of the illuminations which appear in several manuscripts, and how they reinforce the parts of the text where De Pisan claims authorship and authority, as well as permission to use Honore Bonet's book The Tree of Battles.

The text of the web page will include background information about illumination, and how it was perceived by medieval readers. I will also explicate how these two particular illuminations confirm De Pisan's authorship, her authority over her subject matter, and her use of Bonet's work.

I want the first page to have illuminated lettering at the beginning, and plan on including copies of these two illuminations on the web page. I currently have small replications of these in black and white, & am trying to find them in color. My biggest problem is that I do not know how to create the graphics for the illuminated lettering!

Email Elaine with comments or suggestions: eburklow@siu.edu

Angela Campbell--"Visual Rhetoric in Children's Literature"

Fortunate members of American culture will have experienced their first combinations of verbal and visual rhetoric by the time they enter into formal schooling. Before they are ever "taught" to "read," most children have learned to interpret pictures and words through picture books. Using a definition of rhetoric as the use of persuasion, intellectual influence, mental manipulation, and/or subjective clarification to prove a point, make a statement, or emphasize an issue, I will explore certain aspects of the verbal/visual rhetorical relationships in children's literature. (I say subjective clarification because, ('truth" being an illusion, we can only make clear our own personal truths.) From the many types of children's literature I have chosen to focus only on picture books --in which pictures and simple stories are presented together, either by an author and an illustrator or an author who illustrates/illustrator who authors. Within these parameters I will focus on issues of primacy and content. By primacy I mean the importance of each element compared to the other --which element seems stronger or more dominant and which seems to prompt the creation of the other. Content involves comparing words and pictures for detail, style, correlativity, apparent intent, and rhetorical effectiveness.

Email Angela with comments or suggestions: angelcamp@midamer.net

Tracy Clark--" The Rhetoric of Flash"

Flash, a web development tool developed by Macromedia, is designed to offer web designers the opportunity to present "interactive" web content, Specifically, Flash-powered sites are composed of several telltale components: moving type, sounds that activate when the user clicks on the link or moves the mouse, and interactive elements that promise several choices to the user.

Visual rhetoric achieves a new meaning here because the user has the opportunity to "manipulate" the content of the website. However, such interactivity is misleading because everything is pre-programmed into the site. Click on a link and a phrase rolls in from the left, Click on another, and you get a different phrase rolling in from the right. But both outcomes are pre-determined and there are only so many links you have to choose from. Likewise, sounds that are tied to mouse movements are pre-determined in the same way. However, do we really care that we're being restricted after all? Or is the fact that the website in question is doing so many "cool" things more important?

I plan to look at the visual rhetoric of Flash with these considerations in mind-as well as an eye toward perception from within, from without, from the intersection between the two, and from contemplation of all of the above. Considerations of literacy are promising sources for information surrounding the rhetoric of Flash, which has only been around for a few years. They are what Flash is based upon.

My project will take the form of a Flash-enabled site, with a combination of moving visuals, sounds, graphics, and blurbs of conventional text.

Email Tracy with suggestions or comments: tclark@siu.edu

Mik Fanguy--"The Rhetoric of CD Inlays"

CD inlays have always provided the listener with some type of visual material with which to make a cognitive association with either the band or the music. Some inlays provide the listener with photos of the members playing lives shows, such as Nirvana's inlay for the MTV Unplugged album; this seems to fulfill the need of the audience to see the band members instead ofiust hearing them. Other inlays serve as a showcase for the artwork of the members. The Meatpuppets, for example, use their inlays to showcase their paintings and drawings, which also relate back to the subject matter of the music for that particular album. Artists like Beck often make collages of images that seem totally random, incoherent, and sometimes humorous, much like Beck's music itself.

I feel that the visual images in the inlays differ greatly from music videos for a number of reasons, and that these differences make this form of visual media useful and worth including in CD's. While a music video attempts to visually capture the mood of a particular song, the visual content of the inlay must express the sentiments of the entire album. Also, viewing a still photograph or painting gives quite a different effect than watching a music video where there is movement and sound. Still images often lend themselves to more detailed analysis of particular elements since the action of the image is stopped, and the viewer can pick apart each detail. A listener could choose to view the images in the inlay while listening to the CD, and he or she would be able to decide

Email Mik with comments or suggestions: mikfanguy@hotmail.com

Steven Long--"The Theology of Architecture: Is the Medium the Message?

A common thread running through sources I have researched is that the church (as a homiletic interior space) is itself an important message, in some cases just as important as the message "delivered" verbally through the sermon. Such assumptions put into question common linear models of communication -- e.g. Shannon and Weaver's linear model (sender, receiver, channel, code, noise) -- and also Kenneth Burke's pentadic separation of "act," "agent," and "scene."

1. The visible church and Encouragement to Faith, that "the ordinances which we behold, force the unseen truth upon our senses. The very disposition of the building, the subdued light of the aisles, the Alter, with its pious adornments, are figures of things unseen, and stimulate our fainting faith."

--John Henry Newman (Parochial and Plain Sermons, 1839)

2. Gothic ... [possesses] "a profound and commanding beauty, ... which the Church will not see surpassed till it attain to the Celestial City... as harmonious and graceful as it is intellectual."

-- Newman (The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated)

3. [A. Welby] Pugin embraced the conviction, common in nineteenth-century metaphysics and criticism, that, as Wordsworth wrote, "in all forms of things there is a mind " [Alfoxden Note-Book]. "The great argument in favour of Gothick architecture," Ambrose Phillipps noted, "is derived from the circumstance of tis Xtian origin, meaning, and destination " Grecian and Roman architecture were beautiful, but "their pagan origin and meaning" had infected them with error."

-- James Patrick ("Newman, Pugin, and Gothic")

Throughout his clerical career, we find evidence that Newman vacillated back and forth between believing in architecture as being, itself, a Christian message and believing that powerful visual forms like architecture mislead people from the "narrow path of true Christianity":

"Newman doubted that the fair outside' could compensate the absence of inward conversion and sacramental union with the one Church, and among his disciples there was already an awareness that Newman's consuming spiritual and dogmatic concerns and the theories of the great Catholic architect were at cross-purposes" (Patrick 197).

Newman carried a powerful ambivalence toward the visible: the visible or "signifier" element of the signs of Christianity (i.e. church buildings) always seem to be respected by Newman as possessing the power to "move" observers, but whether they moved observers in the appropriate directions seems, to Newman, for less clear:

"Certainly Newman persistently rejected, at least after 1843, Pugin's belief that right religion could find expression only through a single style. An idea, he wrote, 'does not always bear about it the same external image'" (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine 178) (qtd. in Patrick 206)

Email Steve with suggestions or comments: stlong@siu.edu

Gay Ramsey--"Martha Stewart's Living"

Martha Stewart's pictorial representation of an ideal life constitutes and perpetuates particular ideologies. I am fascinated with visual presentations of design, arrangement of color and furniture, and representations of "life" that seem to be so removed from the troubles of our day. How do pictures transport us to another world? In my project, I am asking this question and working on how the ideologies implicit within the pictorial representations in Living are constructed rhetorically. Clearly, the emphasis on style or form subsumes the meaning of these pictures. To better understand the framework for this project I worked through four basic tenets of rhetorical theory ("A Rhetoric Primer" by Peter Marston ed.). These tenets are: rhetoric is advisory, rhetoric is addressed, rhetoric is situated, and rhetoric is stylized.

I. Rhetoric is stylized: the style of the pictures in Living are the primary connection to the logic and meaning of it rhetoric. The choices made to construct particular messages in Living contain the most rhetorical force.

Il. Rhetoric is addressed: the audience implicated in the visual presentations is anyone with an imagination. Those with access to desire (i.e., wanting what the pictures represent) are part of the audience. In our society, the audience of Living would most likely be anyone not in the upper-class.

III. Rhetoric is situated: the needs being addressed by the visual rhetoric in Living, are American needs to escape reality and experience a fantasy/ideal living situation. This living situation is one with money, time, and lots of family and friends (who all get along). In sum, the exigence of this rhetoric is the need for an ordered, simple, and traditional life.

IV. Rhetoric is advisory: the advice given in these pictures is that to escape reality is good and escape through the consumption and production of the pictures in this magazine is even better. In essence, the advice given in this visual rhetoric is to escape reality while reproducing our own oppression through the sociopolitical and economic structures that exist in America.

The visual rhetoric of Martha Stewart's Living is both symbolic of and an obfuscation of ideologies at work within our social structure. In this rhetorical analysis, I am working to fuse notions of visual and verbal metaphors and their links with ideologies to discover how Living represents reality and perpetuates a particular hegemonic structure.

Email Gay with comments or suggestions: gmramsey@siu.edu

Julia Reimer--"Visual Rhetoric in Encounters with Faith: Personal and Public Orientations to Religious Symbols and Images" (title in progress)

The focus is on religious, specifically Christian, symbols and meaning-making that occurs in relation to these. I am looking at both Personal Orientations towards the symbol, image, icon as revealed by the identification that occurs between "believer" and object in everyday unintentional encounters as well as in intentional devotional practices involving objects such as iconic representations of Mary and Jesus, the rosary, crucifix. I am also interested in the way individuals arrange personal spaces with objects and the ideological function these objects serve as, for example, reminders of faith and worldview. I am also looking at the meanings made by those who do not identify with these objects as faith symbols (or at least not as symbols of their own faith).

In big picture terms, my interest here is in exploring the vast ambiguity of symbols in order to get at the ranges of experience and association that are called into play in response to one small (relatively speaking) object or visual image. The evocative power of an image, one might call it. So, to do this, I'll be looking at "insider" and "outsider" orientations, public and private, and reappropriations of symbols for non-religious, anti-religious or ambiguously religious uses--e.g. the recent "Sensation" sensation, uses of crucifixion images to represent oppression or self-sacrifice.

Email Julia with comments or suggestions: jreimer@siu.edu