Hope, Diane S. (2008) “Gendered Environment: Gender and the Natural World in the Rhetoric of Advertising” in Defining Visual Rhetorics (eds.) Charles A. Hill & Marhuerite Helmers: 155-177. New Jersey: LEA.

When image based advertising complicates images of nature with gender narratives, a rhetoric of gendered environments works to obscure the connections between environmental degradation and consumption. Advertisements that combine images of nature with narratives of gender offer consumers visualizations that cloak the impact of consumption on the environment with essentialist fantasies of masculinity or feminity. – 156

Defining Characteristics

Strategies: Appropriated Iconography and Cultural Ubiquity

Advertising History and Gendered Environments

In Summary

Strachan, J. Cherie & Kendall, Kathleen E. (2008) “Political Candidates’ Convention Films: Finding the Perfect Image – An Overview of Political Image Making” in Defining Visual Rhetorics (eds.) Charles A. Hill & Marhuerite Helmers: 135-154. New Jersey: LEA.

Rather than strictly visual impression or depiction, the term political image refers to a carefully constructed condensation of all the attributes a candidate wants to convey to the voters into easily recalled, visual and verbal symbols. – 135

A New Rhetorical Genre Emerges

Common Patterns in Convention Films

The Gore Family Photo Album

Implications of Schema Theory

According to this [schema] theory, people abstract information from their personal and vicarious experience to create mental constructs that organize information about situations and individuals. Each mental construct, or schema, includes a conception of a general pattern, as well as a limited number of illustrative examples. This cognitive structure is used to process new information or to retrieve existing information. -146

Once schema has been developed and a judgment put into place, it is particularly difficult to change because people engage in selective perception. – 147

Bush’s Paean to America

Conclusion

Blackesley, David (2008) “Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock’s Vertigo” in Defining Visual Rhetorics (eds.) Charles A. Hill & Marhuerite Helmers: 111-133. New Jersey: LEA.

Defining Film Rhetoric

Film Language

this approach [film language] treats film both semiotically and phenomenologically as a grammatical system of signs, with attention to spectatorship and perceptual processes. Metz’s groundbreaking work in particular has been enormously influential, mostly for his attempt to develop a sign system for film spectatorship, drawing heavily from Lacanian psychoanalysis. Metz develops for film analysis the concept of the mirror stage – the moment of self-recognition and distinction that marks he immersion into language – and the insistence of the letter in the unconscious – the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language. In tying this semiotic system to the imaginary, Metz shifts our focus to the construction and reception of film and, thus, ways that film functions both like a language, but also rhetorically, as an appeal to or assertion of identity in the audience. – 114

Film Ideology

This approach [film ideology] to film rhetoric views films as serving ideological purposes in both its content, technical apparatus, and distribution mechanism. It examines film in its partisan aspects, as a kind of “pamphleteering”. The task of film criticism is to expose film’s complicity with or deconstruction of dominant ideology. – 115

As cultural expression, films reveal not only the predispositions of its makers, but they also serve ideological functions in the broader culture (as critique, as hegemonic force, as symptomatic) that can be analyzed as having a rhetorical function, especially to the extent that rhetoric serves as the means of initiating cultural critique and stabilizing cultural pieties. – 116

Film Interpretation

This approach [film interpretation] treats film as a rhetorical situation involving the director, the film, and the viewer in the total act of making meaning. – 116

Chatman attempts to show that film interpretation should account for audience reaction, the formal elaboration and function of genre, and the symbolic representation of meaning on screen. – 116

Film Identification

This approach [film identification] considers film rhetoric as involving identification and division. Film style directs the attention of the ideological, psychological, or social purposes. – 116

For Metz, identification occurs in the imaginary realm of the signifier, where film narratives create the conditions for identification to occur in a secondary order of reality. – 117

The Case of Vertigo

Mulvey explains: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. – 121

“Looking is hoping, desiring, never just taking in light, never merely collecting patterns and data. Looking is possessing or the desire to possess – we eat food, we own objects, and we “possess” bodies – and there is not looking without thoughts of using, possessing, repossessing, cherishing, borrowing, and stealing. I cannot look at anything – any object, any person – without the shadow of the thought of possessing that thing. Those appetites don’t just accompany looking: they are looking itself.” – Elkinson (The Object Stares Back) – 122

Visual Rhetoric and Identification

Helmers, Marguerite & Hill, Charles A. (2008) “Introduction” in Defining Visual Rhetorics (eds.) Charles A. Hill & Marhuerite Helmers: 1-23. New Jersey: LEA.

We learn who we are as private or public citizens by seeing ourselves reflected in images, and we learn who we can become by transporting ourselves into images. – 1

Images work on us synchronically and diachronically. Synchronically, we view the image that represents the present. Diachronic viewing are slightly more complicated, for we view an image that represents the past and was created in the past, but we also view contemporaneous images with a knowledge of their precursors and their previous meanings. – 12-13

I. Intertextuality

“all that sets the text in relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other text” – Gerard Genette  - 14

Paratextuality indicates the presence of material around the primary text, but in which the text is embedded: the framing acts of title, subtitle, preface, illustration, book covers, dust jackets, and the setting of the book which is dependent on external conditions, which the readers cannot ignore. – 14

Metatextuality moves outward to consider the effects of commentary and critical relationships posed between one text and others. – 14

Hypertextuality indicates a level of dependence between texts: Text B is unable to exist without Text A. – 14

architextuality indicates a general classification of the text or object that must result from paratextuality. In other words, the library classification of a text with call letters such as PR or an HQ depends on the degree to which the text is like other texts. – 14

II. Peirce on Semiotics

Peirce’s conviction was phenomenological: Things exist in reality outside of what we perceive or think about them. – 15

Three theories of sign emerge in his [Peirce] philosophy of logic as semiotics, and each of these theories is parsed in detail, but the one that is used most frequently by rhetoricians to discuss both language and images is the triadic theory of icon, index, and symbol. Peirce’s distinctions are useful to rhetoricians because they establish a formal terminology for considering different types of imagistic sign systems, from representational, through diagrammatical, to allegorical. – 15

Two levels of terminology establish the relationship of sign to referent. At the first level, Peirce contended that a sign stands for an object; it “tells about” its object. He gave this sign the name representamen. The representamen is rhetorical; it “addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign is called the “interpretant”. The interpretant represents an idea that Peirce called “the ground of the representation.” The interpretant is thus a mental representation; it is not a person. Thus, both representamen and interpretant relate to the same object. – 15

The icon may be abstract or representational; it possesses a character that makes it significant. A vacation photograph and Charles Schultz’s Snoopy are icons, but so is a pencil streak indicating a geometric line. The Object does not have to exist, for it is easy enough to visually represent and alien from “outer space” or a solar system even though we have not seen either. Peirce refers to the icon as an image. – 15

The index, on the other hand, depends on the existence of the Object to have left what Jacques Derrida, in Dissemination, would later call a “trance”. Therefore, the indexical image holds an existential relationship to its Object and often raises in the viewer a memory of a similar Object. The classical example of an indexical sign is a bullet hole. The interpretant indicates, “here is a hole in the front door” and relates the hole to the other holes, but not to the Object (a bullet making a hole) because the object – the bullet and the gun – are missing. In Roland Barthes’ words, the index “points but does not tell”. Peirce describes the index as a diagram. – 16

The symbol is the most abstract of the three sign types. It depends on the interpretant, that is, the mental representation in the mind’s eye. Therefore, the symbolic image holds a conventional relationship to its object that is not contingent on resemblance. […] Peirce calls the symbol a metaphor. – 16

III. Barthes on Signs

According to Saussure, understanding is established by difference; practically speaking, we understand cat because cat is different from dog. The names are merely arbitrary, established by social and linguistic convention, rather than having any existential link to the object itself. – 16-17

Visual Rhetoric, An Indiscipline