English 5376 Online Publications
Sue Henson
Response Paper # 2
Introduction
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A
Shifting Rhetoric
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Visual Rhetoric |
The College Curriculum
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Applications
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Works Cited
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Tracing the historical development of oral cultures
to literate ones, Walter Ong argues that the transformative powers of print
technologies produced a restructuring
of consciousness. That same effect, he predicts, will be multiplied with
advances in electronic technologies. “Technologies are not mere exterior
aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than
when they affect the word” (82).
Understanding the power of language to transform
thought and recognizing the power of technologies to transform language, Ong’s
predictions seem logical and imminent. Many dramatic changes in just about
every field of study have altered humans’ perspective and opened up areas of
knowledge and research only imagined before technological advances.
In some fields, however, such dramatic changes are
not only unwelcome but feared. Many scholars in academia are skeptical that
electronic technologies’ can positively alter the ways in which we think and
communicate. They fear that moving from print to electronic technologies will
somehow diminish our capacity for complex thought and deep analysis. These
fears are ungrounded, and the skepticism rests, in part, on the devaluing of
visual forms of expression in favor of verbal ones. This doesn’t make sense in
light of the fact that print culture arose as a visual contrast to the oral
culture on which it is based.
Ong explains, “Because it moves speech from the
oral-aural to a new sensory world, that of vision, [writing] transforms speech
and thought as well” (85). It would seem obvious that a recognition of the power of the visual
element in print technology should carry over to electronic technologies whose
nature is even more suitable for its expression.
I am keenly interested in
the relationships among visual literacy, epistemology, and the restructuring of
consciousness. And I sense that we are indeed at the dawning of a new epoch of
discovery and enlightenment because of rapid advances brought about by
technology. Fifteen years ago, Richard Friedhoff and William Benzon explored
the connections between the pre-conscious physiology of the human visual system
and the development of conscious thought, of thinking that is distinctly
visual. In the Introduction to Visualization The Second Computer Revolution,
they explain.
“When we visualize through
the use of external means such as computers, we restructure a problem so that
more of it is processed by the pre-conscious part of our brain—the visual system
that is our silent partner. In this way, consciousness can be devoted to the
highest levels of analysis and synthesis.”
With an undergraduate
education in Speech, Communications, and Theatre, and graduate work in
literature and composition, I have always understood the connection among the
communicative arts and the interplay between verbal and visual rhetoric. That
is why Lanham’s The Electronic Word had such an impact on me, because it
reinforced the value of the traditional focus of the arts and letters and shed
light on rhetoric’s failure to keep up with developments in its sister
disciplines, especially in terms of new technologies.
The impact of visualization
on knowledge, its expression as a component of culture, and its application (or
lack of) in the college writing curriculum is the focus of this paper. A
unifying assumption underlying each of my points is this: to affect the ways
students write and think about writing and to equip them with the communicative
skills they need in a technological, globally-oriented, multicultural society,
we must broaden our instruction in rhetoric to include visual rhetoric and
electronic technologies. In addition, we should structure a multidisciplinary
approach incorporating courses in communication and the arts which complement
the freshman composition course.
To be effective teachers of rhetoric depends on our
understanding of how new technologies have changed the forms of rhetoric, the
nature of knowledge, and the learning styles of students.
FORM THINKING CHARACTERISTICS NATURE
Oral
poetic
fixed
in the present verbal
public
present
perspective
Literate philosophical fixed in
time and space visual-one
linear private dimensional
historical perspective
Electronic multidimensional intransient in time and verbal, visual,
associative space hypermediated
public
present perspective
Before diving into a defense of visual rhetoric and
electronic technologies, it is instructive (or at least it was for me) to
understand the reticence among scholars toward technology and their dismissal
of the visual expressions and components of rhetoric. The disagreement centers
on two areas of concern: content and methodology. Many authors cite the ongoing
debate in academia over whether the established canon of literature of the
Western tradition should be revised to include works from a broader multicultural
base, works from related disciplines, and works from popular culture. Sven Birkerts is concerned about the debate over
content, over technology’s influence on the reading and writing public, and
over education’s response to these developments.
In “The Gutenberg Elegies.The Fate of
Birkerts predicts three negative consequences of technology’s
influence on the reading and writing skills of education’s client population:
the erosion of language, the loss of privacy, and the flattening of the
historical perspective. In discussing
the erosion of language, he claims that
as students become more immersed in the familiar and vernacular environment of
Internet communication, they will become less contemplative and less skilled in
the use of standard English as “complex discourse patterns” become fragmented
and lose their power under “layers of
mediation.” He laments, “Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while
ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing” and that
the richness of language is being replaced by the “simple ‘vision thing.’”
These passages invite several points of contention.
First, how is it that ambiguity, paradox, subtlety, and wit belong only to the
print domain? Although I too have noticed among my first-year students a
declining aptitude for analytical thought, I am not so sure that it is the fault
of technology. A terribly mismanaged and ineffective educational system
combined with poor parenting would be first on my list of suspected causes.
Birkerts excludes the possibility that closer scrutiny of electronic discourse
may reveal more complex patterns of discourse than what one observes in
face-to-face communication; students may have internalized subtleties of
expression, in the context of electronic space, that we are not yet aware of.
The iconic style of language evident in chat rooms and Instant Messaging
environments is visual, communicative,
and social.
Emoticons are important in communicating the spirit
of a message and in preserving social cohesion; expressions like CUL8ER (see
you later) convey both the meaning and playfulness of a social construct.
Lanham explains: “Stylistic decorum measures how we look alternately AT and
THROUGH a text (or a painting), first accept it as referential and then refer
it to a reality beyond. The same measurement is then mapped onto behavior as a
social decorum. Every stylistic balance models a social one”(113).
Educators can take advantage of students’
multi-tasked, multilayered, multisensory
experiences in hyperspace to guide them in an exploration of the symbols
and constructs of social interaction, thus engaging them in deep analysis and
critical thinking and cultivating their ability to see AT and THROUGH
rhetorical styles.
The second point of contention concerns Birkert’s
attitude toward “the vision thing.” He mistrusts visual elements of rhetoric as being
simplistic or superficial and compares the development of the notion of visual
rhetoric to that of postmodernism in the arts, which he characterizes as
irreverently unhistorical , dismissive of cultural hierarchy, manipulative in
its appropriation of stylistic
signatures, referential to the surrounding culture, and primarily associative
in perspective.
Birkerts believes that electronic communication and
multimedia provide only information while print media foster understanding
through close reading. He believes that
multimedia packages of content promote “the illusion of access”, a set of
knowledge he describes as “collage” at the expense of deep thought and critical
analysis. In describing the act of learning, he suggests that “every lateral
attainment is purchased with a sacrifice of depth.”
This perspective strikes me as quite narrow. Learning
technologies that appeal to a variety of the senses create a perspective which
is broad, relational, and holistic. He does not seem to give credit to the
notion that learning in one field adds depth, dimension, and perspective to
learning in another field.
He uses as his example, a student learning
Shakespeare through a multi-faceted approach including a knowledge of Elizabethean politics, the
construction of the Globe theatre, etc. He claims that such a collage approach
to learning will distract the student from the more “serious” study of the
text, interfere with her ability to concentrate on complex passages in order to
explicate their deeper meaning, and appreciate the nuances of the
language. This indeed seems to me not
only an elitist approach to what constitutes valid knowledge, but also a narrow
understanding of how students learn.
Lanham tells us that computers and new technologies
have made it possible for the teaching of rhetoric and literature in a much
more expansive way than ever before, involving the other arts. Because
literature is orally-based and self-consciously rhetorical, he believes, its
“repurposing” through electronic media which shares those same characteristics,
“can reveal to us aspects of our greatest works of art—literary, artistic, and
musical—that we have never noticed before” (131). Lanham asserts that digital media have created a
conceptual world which is “dynamic rather than static…participatory rather than
authorial, [and] based as much on image and sound as on word” (133). Such an
expansion of thinking and perception
certainly opens up new possibilities for the study of rhetoric.
Dr. Robert N. St. Clair
teaches in the Department of Communication at the
Knowledge is revealed by structure. These structures
may be in the form of language, music, or art. The concept of structural
epistemology allows one to go beyond language in a rhetorical culture. It
brings in other forms of knowing in the form of visual and resonance metaphors.
Structural Epistemology has to do with the expression of sign systems and
Structural Hermeneutics has to do with the interpretation of various sign
systems within a knowledge framework.
Through visual metaphor, Robert N. St. Clair
contends, cultural knowledge is expressed and preserved. Verbal metaphors are
characteristic of the Western tradition and print culture while visual
metaphors figure prominently in oral cultures. St. Clair explains, “Visual
metaphor is a term that designates how visual space is organized as a means of
sharing cultural and social knowledge” (85).
Knowing that oral traditions were the predecessors of
literate ones and that visual rhetoric is the foundation of the oral tradition,
it is surprising that research has
ignored this component and that higher education has not incorporated it as a
fundamental subject of study. The influence of visual thinking on styles of
cognition and on communication should be an important rationale for examining
the way we teach Rhetoric and Composition and the way we structure the college
curriculum. Lanham suggests that visual rhetoric is concerned with not just “ornamentation
of a preexisting rational argument but with an expanded sense of human reason
itself”(125).
St.Clair contrasts Western print culture with Native
American oral culture:
“Where one sees words, the other sees visual
patterns, shapes, colors, and moods.” He contrasts the Western tradition’s
focus on analysis with the oral tradition’s focus on relatedness. “The
analytical mode is sequential and highlights rationalism and the use of logic,
whereas the relational mode is concerned with the emotive or affective aspects
of a simultaneous presentation of imagery.”
Ignoring a substantive and substantial mode of
thought and expression in the college curriculum seems to me to be cultural
bigotry.
Lanham argues for a restructuring of the college
curricula, focusing on the reunification of rhetoric and the fine and
performing arts, the historical arts and
letters, which have become gradually and increasingly fragmented and compartmentalized
in academia. Much of what I have read, studied, and observed in the last couple
years has brought me to the same conclusion.
Perhaps this kind of restructuring—the “rhetorical
paideia”-- would reinvigorate English studies. Perhaps if we recognized the
significance of visual as well as verbal imagery, we might conclude that our
students’ shorthand style of internet communication is not a denegration of
language but a reinvention of it as visual and symbolic.
Perhaps we would recognize that visual metaphor is an
important teaching tool, not just for analyzing the persuasive appeals in
advertising but for understanding how cultures organize thought and transmit
meaning and experience.
Perhaps attention to visual metaphor and visual
thinking will add another dimension and greater depth to the rhetorical
analysis of texts.
Craig Stroupe argues, as does St. Clair, Lanham, that
rhetoricians and English departments need to examine their cultural biases that
exclude, devalue, or deny the importance of visual discourse. Stroupe argues
for a hybrid approach to the teaching of English composition, an approach which
incorporates verbal and visual literacies in a more powerful rhetoric(609).
Stroupe believes that a hybrid literacy is a natural
transition and desirable return to the idealogy of elaborationism in rhetoric:
“a set of cultural, pedagogical, and technical practices based on the idea that
the formal composing or reading processes can produce more critical forms of
consciousness” (609). Stroupe explains
that elaborationism…crosses not only the visual/verbal border, but also the
boundaries that politically polarize and artificially stratify the discipline
into curricular dichotomies of poetic and rhetoric, high and low, literature
and composition.”
My own colleagues are divided into two camps
concerning the teaching Freshman composition. Some treat it as essentially a
sophomore survey of literature, claiming that the goals of critical analysis
and writing can as easily and effectively be taught with a literature focus as
with a focus on traditional argument and current issues.
These approaches illustrate philosophical differences
in teaching writing as a literature-based tool versus writing as a
communication tool. I think this philosophy is what Stroupe calls the
“dismissal of the popular, predominantly visual discourses of magazines and
advertising as well as the more iconic media of movies, television, and the
internet” (610).
Stroupe distinguishes the term iconic, which refers
to a style of expression that is characteristic of popular culture and thus not
deserving of serious academic study(according to traditionalists), from the
term iconoclastic, which characterizes modern and postmodern art’s style of
expression that is complex and elaborationist.
“Indeed, works that emerge from the culture of elaborationism typically
value complexity, irony, connotation, and deferred meanings, achieved through
an awareness of the medium itself, whether visual or verbal.”
Stroupe’s intention is to foster the perspective
toward composition and computers as one in which expression is enriched and
‘elaborate” because of a hybrid literacy of verbal and visual rhetorical
techniques.
He argues for a dissolution of the imagined borders
“between ordinary discourse of the workplace or popular culture and an ideal of
elaborated discourse as a special province of literary artistry or critical
literacy” (629).
I think instructors of rhetoric need to develop and incorporate in their
teaching visual reference points for texts so that students’ reading
comprehension and writing skills increase as they discover both verbal and
visual strategies. Visual literacy complements verbal literacy, and training in
both may develop cultural literacy as well.
We might begin with simple illustrations of rhetorical patterns. The
following four examples are starting points for the development of hypertextual
visual aids. In the first, I added highlighting, links, and a key to a
paragraph for analysis in a freshman composition course. This paragraph, a
favorite of mine, contains metaphors and cultural allusions which are lost on
my freshman students. To further develop this example, I would add hypertext
links to short passages that provide a cultural/historical context for the
passage. The second example is an illustration of using transitions for
coherence from The Little, Brown Handbook, 6th ed. to which
I’ve added highlighting. The third is a commercial illustration in the
Teacher’s Guide to Perspectives on Argument, and the last example comes
from a course web page by Professor
Albert Rouzie at
·
Visualizing metaphor, allusion, cultural knowledge
·
Visualizing paragraph structure, organization
·
Visualizing
argument
As I said before, these examples are only starting
points. But if we experiment with ways of making texts more visual, if we take
an inter-disciplinary approach to genre
study, if we incorporate visual as well as verbal metaphor in the analysis of
text, and if we incorporate hypertextual strategies in student research,
perhaps we will cultivate visual, verbal, and cultural literacies that
significantly expand the consciouness of our students and make our discipline
more vibrant and relevant in their lives.
Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies. The Fate of
Friedhoff, Richard and William Benzon. Visualization The Second Computer Revolution.
Heim, Michael. “The Theory of Transformative
Technologies.” Electric Language, 2nd.ed.
Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic word. Democracy,
Technology, and the Arts.
Ong, Walter J. “Print, Space, and Closure.” Orality
and Literacy.
St. Clair, Robert N. “Structural Epistemology.” Personal Web Page. 30 Nov. 2005. http://www.louisville.edu/~rnstcl01/
---.“Visual Metaphor, Cultural Knowledge, and the New
Rhetoric.” In John Reyhner, Louise Lockhard, W. Sakeswtewa Gilber and Joseph
Martin (editors), Learning in
Beauty: Indigenous Education for a New Century.
Stroupe, Craig. “Visualizing English: Recognizing the Hybrid Literacy of Visual and Verbal Authorship on the Web.” College English May 2000: 607-635.
Warnick, Barbara. “Looking to the Future: Electronic Texts and the Deepening Interface.” Technical Communication Quarterly. Summer 2005: 327+ or 14.3 (2005): 327+.
Zappan, James P. “Digital Rhetoric: Toward an Integrated Theory.” Technical Communication Quarterly. Summer 2005: 319+.
