The “Evocative Power” of Visual Argument: the “Condescending Willy Wonka” Meme and Blair

“The visual symbolism must register immediately, whether consciously or not. The arguer must know and relate not only to the beliefs and attitudes of the intended audience, but also to the visual imagery that is meaningful to it.” J. Anthony Blair, The Rhetoric if Visual Arguments In J. Anthony Blair’s “The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments,”

Dwellings as Memorials: Commemorating Culture thorough Archaeological Site Preservation & Interpretation

Sturken’s analysis of the Vietnam Memorial presents a persuasive argument on commemoration of cultural memory, or as she explains it, the combination of the sanctioned historical narrative and the personal experiences that happened within that event. These two key parts of cultural memory are vital when the memorial is erected during the lifetimes of the

Creating the Pictoral Turn in the Composition Classroom: Composing and Rhetorical Choices in the Digital Age of Emojis and GIFs

“This anxiety, this need to defend “our speech” against “the visual” is, I want to suggest, a sure sign that a pictorial turn is taking place.” WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 12 Within recent years, social media has created a major shift in media creation, particularly for students in the Millennial and Generation Z grouping.

Decreed Notable: Roland Barthes in the Digital Age of Selfies

“Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The “anything whatever” then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.     Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, a collection of brief theoreticalessays on the photograph and composition, presents a problematic situation in the

A Woman is Meant to Appear: Rhetorical Analysis of the Jours Aprés Lunes Children’s Lingerie Advertisement

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself…From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 46) John Berger, in his seminal work, Ways of Seeing, proposes that in art (and all of the visual forms