I'm swamped with portfolios, a task that just doesn't seem to be congruent with summer. Oh well. I used O'Brien's and Alfano's Envision, a visual rhetoric, for the first time this semester and it's gone quite well. I think (I hope) students have been able to more easily find a unique angle on their research questions, angles that allow them to actually throw something back into the debate rather than pretending like they can fix the problem. Also, in many cases, the visual analysis and production in student papers has lead to more ownership, a sense that they have "crafted" their work in ways that only they could. Above is an example from a paper which argued that one can have a rational belief in God without relying on complicated philosophical treatises. In this example the student has tried to visually represent her critique of the ontological argument for God. The words in the background are complicated explanations of the ontological view.
In another example, one I couldn't figure out how to reproduce here, a student created a paraody of a Jessica Alba cover for Self magazine. In her parody, entitled "REALITY"--Alba's head sits in between "REAL" and "ITY," she found a photo from the same photo shoot and then superimposed her own article titles: "hooked on plastic surgery," "Diet pills might be dangerous," etc.
While I'm leery of giving the visual too much credit (as if writing, as we know it, will soon disappear), I do think composition teachers (as has been said over and over again throughout the years) must allow and prepare students to use visual design and rhetoric in the creation of standard English papers. I know much of this has already occurred in public genre focused courses, but it seems to me that it doesn't necessarily take a public genre to teach and/or make the visual integral to what we write. Of course, as I was discussing with a colleague yesterday, it may take much new learning on our parts to reintegrate and introduce the low-culture/carnivalesque/pop culture into our academic composing.
2 comments:
I say the sooner I can incorporate the "low-culture/carnivalesque/pop culture" into my classes the better!
But, I disagree that visual rhetoric is all of these things. In academia we favor the word so much, that we ignore the complexity of the visual (as if interpreting and creating visual arguments is somehow baser). This is my biggest concern about English types teaching vis. rhet--that we'll think we just get it. As I've been reading a variety of design books, I am reminded of just how complex the visual is. As I've mentioned probably too many times, my sister-in-law is a graphic designer and she knows stuff that I'm sure I'll never understand. Take typefaces, for instance. I can understand the basics of serifs and x-heights and all that, but I could never understand type enough to create a typeface. There's a level of knowledge there that eludes me. And I think as verbal folks teaching vis rhet, we need to approach it with a bit of awareness that we may not really get it.
I agree: I don't really get it and I'm not sure I really ever will, like your sister-in-law, as I'm primarily a word guy. But I'm not arguing for a low/high split, rather suggesting academic discourse has always been part of all these things (low cult, pop cult) but has been unwilling to admit it.
I do think the visual is more "low" or pop in that it is readily taken in and accessible. Of course, though I know I'm a hypocrite at times, the low and carnivalesqe don't have to be seen as less complex. Why can't the visual be more attune to the popular and yet also be complex? Why is alligning the visual with "these things" mean it's necessarily less complex?
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