Visual Culture: Reading Its Rhetoric

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Visual Culture Reading Its Rhetoric

• English 110
• Group Project

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The Power of Signs

• Rhetorical analysis may also yield
  interpretations that foreground ideology and the
  power of representation (including the production
  and circulation of texts)
• Ideology The beliefs, interests, and values that
  determine one's interpretations or judgements.
  

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Objectives

• Focus on icons as rich sites for rhetorical and
  cultural analysis
  
• Model how the range of associations and
  observations for interpreting icons are governed
  by context
  

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Icons

• Icon (n), iconic (adj), an icon is someone (often
  a celebrity) who enjoys a commanding or
  representative place in popular culture.
  
• Aaron Betsky, curator at San Francisco Museum of
  Modern Art, defines icons as "magnets of meaning
  onto which we project our memories, our hopes,
  our sense of self"

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Pop Culture Icons

• Match-Up Quiz (individually)
• What values are attributed to iconic figures?
• What does the People Magazine list suggest about
  the process of anointing certain public figures
  iconic status? Which icons speak to whom and why?
  What kind of people are not on the list?

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Pop Culture Icons--Match-Up QuizAnswer Key(page
1 of 2)

• Elvis Presley the pelvis
• Oprah Winfrey "If she can do it, anyone can."
• Marilyn Monroe blonde bombshell
• Ellen Degeneres "Yep, I'm Gay"
• Michael Jackson invented the moonwalk
• Princess Diana "She was a diamond"
• Michael Jordan "He became larger than his
  sport"
  
• Madonna "She's done whatever she wanted"
• Superman "a man's man"

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Answer Key (cont.)

• Mister Rogers "The last of the good guys"
• John F. Kennedy Jr. "prince of privilege and
  tragedy
  
• Elizabeth Taylor "The closest thing we have to
  American royalty
  
• Muhammad Ali "I'm the greatest
• Bill Clinton "I did not have sex with that
  woman
  
• Ben Affleck "Your basic tall, dark, and
  handsome
  
• Arnold Schwarzenegger "I'll be back"

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The American Flag

• The American Flag is entirely semiotic.
• The American Flag substitutes signs (stars and
  stripes) for things (13 original
  colonies--stripes 50 starsstates)
  
• These signs achieve their meaning through
  association with a system--the network within
  which signs function.

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The American Flag as Image Icon

• Generate associations with your students
• Patriotism
• Independence
• Freedom
• Nationalism
• what else?

• Varying contexts in which image icon appears
• National monuments
• Protests
• where else?

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American Flag as IconAdvertisement
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Generating an Interpretation

• patriotic image of multicultural affluence
• an image of the American Dream and social class
  mobility
  
• an image of leisure and prestige and culture
• an image of independence

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Generating Analytical Claims

• That advertisers depend on the fact that we know
  a great deal about the messages that certain
  images convey.
  
• They count on a few generalized meanings
  (patriotism, opportunity, independence, and so
  on).
  
• In order to relay meaning, visual language
  depends on familiarity, patterns of use,
  composition, references to other images, and the
  context in which the image appears.

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Rhetorical Contexts
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Generating a Thesis

• Weak Thesis Context shapes the meaning of an
  icon.
  
• Stronger Thesis A comparative analysis of a
  Tommy Hilfiger ad and Faith Ringgold's painting
  "Flag of the Moon" reveals how context alters the
  meaning ascribed to images of the American flag.
  
• Even Stronger While advertisers such as Hilfiger
  use the image of the American flag to convey
  loyalty, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
  Faith Ringgolds painting reveals a profound
  irony in the use of this icon by exposing those
  aspects of American culture, such as inequality,
  racism, often rendered invisible.
• See pages 122- 135 in Writing Analytically

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Generating a Working Thesis

• A theory about the meaning of evidence
• search for something that raises questions
• treat as hypothesis
• evolve your thesis--move it forward
• ask So what?

• dont abandon conflicting evidence or
  interpretations
  
• qualify thesis after initial formulations

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5 kinds of weak theses (Writing Analytically, Ch
7)

• Makes no claim
• are obviously true
• restate conventional wisdom
• offer personal conviction as the basis for the
  claim
  
• make an overly broad claim

• Raise specific issues
• Find an area of inquiry
• Seek to complicate
• Try on other points of view
• Convert broad categories and generic claims to
  more qualified assertions

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ActivityReading Icons

• As a class
• Generate an interpretation of distributed images
• What icons are present in each image?
• What ideas, events, ideologies do you associate
  with each image?
  
• Does the meaning of the icon shift from one image
  to the other? If so, what accounts for such
  differences?
  
• In pairs
• Generate two thesis statements that emerge from
  your analysis a weak and a strong example.
  
• Turn in your thesis statements (to be posted on
  WebCT)
  
• As a class
• Share observations about group activity
• Question and Answer

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Analyzing Icons
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Examples Weak Thesis
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Examples Strong Thesis