njeanne’s blog

May 20-22

Introduction to Part Three

The Rhetoric of Design

VRDW: 225-26

Handa introduces the reader to a new “realm of design” in the digital world. This arrangement often combines both words and images. This includes various fonts of color, digital photos, and clip art. Part Three provides a new way of thinking about design functioning as rhetoric. For teachers, this opens a world of graphic communication and a new way to look at rhetoric in composition studies. Today, many students have created a personal Web page, but they need to understand how rhetorical principles can also apply in the development of writing using visual and digital texts.

Rhetoric, Humanism, and Design

Richard Buchanan: 228-59

Design appeared as a “distinct discipline only in the twentieth century…” This, however, may be traced back to an ancient world of art disciplines. Aristotle had a unique understanding of “differences among all of the arts…” He called this “poetic science” a term derived from the Greek term “making.” The relationship of rhetoric and the arts of “making,” and the understanding of rhetoric as a cultural art was brought about by the translation of Aristotle’s Poetic in various languages in the sixteenth century. Interestingly, Leonardo da Vinci’s “speculations on mechanical devices” expressed his poetic and visual imagination.

The ability to look at rhetoric in an artistic way has helped me create and submit a related Thesis Proposal.

njeanne’s blog

VRDW: May 6-8

Part Two: (131-222)

Page 133 introduces us to a condensed view of this section of the textbook, with invitations to chapters that draw interest to the readers. For example, Arnheim gives us a sample of various images that function as rhetoric. He discusses meaning of visual images and when printed in association with words offer “a linguistic message” that is both “denotative and connotative. In other words, rhetoric is easily adapted to images, and Arnheim notes that cartoons can speak with amplification in ways “realistic pictures cannot” (133-34).

Arnheim comments on Scott McCloud’s cartoons and how they “amplify ideas” and ways that help the reader to understand how cartoon images are not “frivolous forms of drawings,” but they are serious forms of communication, and in fact show hybrid rhetoric that can be introduced to composition students. McCloud’s “The Rhetoric of the Image” proves that text along with images is a hybrid of composition that could be effectively used in composition classes (195-208).

Writing, Technology and Teens

PewResearch Center Publications

Although Professor Rhodes posted this, it is not required reading, but I found this article informative in researching teens, and their responses to technology of the Internet and communication through text-messaging as not writing. The evidence gathered is somewhat of a “digital age paradox” because, although teens spend a great deal of time composing texts, they do not think that much of the material they create electronically is real writing. Teens also prefer writing for an audience because it “motivates” them to write well. They also do not believe that writing with a computer elevates the quality of their writing (1-4). Online http://pewresearch.org/pubs/808/writing-technology-and-teens.

njeanne’s blog

 April 22-24

Students Who Teach Us

 

            Selfe uses the term “new media texts” when referring to texts in multiple media: film, video, audio, and others. Visual elements are emphasized, and she introduces these sections in bold print: This chapter argues that this system should be in classrooms “to teach new literacies. She believes that David taught her about composition using the new media texts as she learned about him and his life. The author devotes over four pages informing the readers of the “turbulent years” in which he was moved from one family to another in different states. David had no access to computers until high school and took “a computer literacy course.” It was here that he became successful in moving ahead. In later years, however, despite his success in web work, his Standard English was not developed, and as he continued Web design, his GPA dropped, he failed and was out of the university because of English standards. Selfe believes that David’s case proves that “new forms of literacy” have life spans and compete with pre-existing forms of literacy. Understanding of new media texts is necessary in a “postmodern world…” 51. In the closing pages, the author poses questions and exercises for teachers’ use (59-65).

 

I found the story of David Damon very interesting and proof that other alternatives using new media texts are necessary.

 

 Paradigms Lost and Found: The “Crisis of Representation” and Visual Anthropology

 

            Lutkehaus and Cool refer to the “paradigms lost” of the problem that occurred in the 1980s. There have been implications that anthropologists in a “postmodern, postcolonial, post feminist erosion of paradigmatic authority” have resulted in an authorative challenge in anthropology. The experiments in the “new ethnography,” however, have influenced recent ethnographic films, and many of these films and videos are the successful products of filmmakers and anthropologists working with the Center for Visual Anthropology (CVA) at the University of Southern California. This effort at CVA began in the late 1970s (435). Lutkehaus and Cool present a “dialectic relationship” that occurs with both the written ethnography and ethnographic film. The authors refer to the “narrative structure” in the video created by Sensiper of “stereotypical representation” such as those in Hollywood’s version of Tibet as “Shangri-La” in the classic film Lost Horizon. Sensiper discusses how the effects of these “romanticized images” and there effects contrast dramatically with the Tibet culture of today. Sensiper also meets a Tibetan refugee whom she accompanies to Tibet, where he has not visited since he left as a child in the 1950s. The anthropologist’s video of the refugee and his return home as an adult portray “an additional layer of irony” to the simplistic hopes at the beginning of the video (439).

 

Interestingly, I am old enough to have seen the film Lost Horizon, and it was a wonderful dreamlike environment, unlike the Tibet of today.

 

njeanne’s blog April 15 – 17 Part 1 and Hill’s essay

            Craig Stroupe introduces terms that have been somewhat of a mystery: hypertext, lexias, hypermedia, and web design in the “new work paradigm.” This is in contrast to Aristotle’s rhetor, the present “verbal contentmaster is not necessarily the controller of the form and rhetoric of the site as a whole but may work far down the chain of command” (14). Stroupe refers to Cynthia and Richard Selfe’s question as to the “social consequences of composing through an interface that is visual and iconic in its focus…and not exclusively verbal…?”(17). Stroupe states that there is contrast to Elbow’s “metaphors” of a solitary “process of invention” and the Web page where “everyone can publish” and this contains a very different environment that is less like Aristotle’s public speaking, which is a “one-speaker-at-a-time orderliness” (19). Stroupe also includes another philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, who visualizes English studies “as a theoretical vision of hybridization that goes beyond invention processes” (25). Strupe’s attention to the image of Ulmer’s “The New “Atlantis” (31) concludes his article on this demonstration of “a synthesis of poetic and rhetoric…(35).

 

            Charles Hill’s article was a pleasure to read, and his descriptions are clear and informative. He quotes Jay Bolter’s claim that we are now in “the late age of print” (2), and today’s students have probably been exposed to more “texts”, in a visual form, than “any other generation in history” (107. Hill contends that there is a difference between “the act of seeing an object…and seeing a visual representation of it” (114). “Rhetorical images” do not have to “portray and object,” and older representations have meanings both visual and verbal because the “new representation” can be associated with the past (115). Hill believes that in addition to images of “cultural artifacts,” students need to discover “psychological processes” which these images portray (119). Hill also presents an “older” philosopher, Kenneth Burke, who believes that “images can be rhetorically powerful, and “an evocative image” can be associated in individual’s minds with “many kindred principles or ideas.” Hill points out that Burke discusses the use of “verbal imagery as in poetry” (120).

 

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