Spring 2017
MALAS 600D
VISUAL RHETORIC
Prof. Cezar Ornatowski
Tuesday 7:00-9:40 pm
In the last decade, visuality has become a major focus of
theory and research in a variety of fields (rhetoric, communication, cultural
studies, literary studies, and science studies).
Much of communication today is visual, from
television to film, videos, and images posted on Facebook. The ubiquity of
visual communication in the global communication age is due in large part to
the power of visual images (they impact our emotions directly, short-circuiting
our rational mind), their “truth-effect,” and the fact that they appear to
transcend language barriers. For al these reasons, in spite of their seeming
“truth-value,” images are also heavily manipulated (staged, Photo-shopped, false
captioned, and so on). Visuality has in fact become the major arena of
political and cultural “struggle” in the electronic—and not only
electronic--domain. In addition, with the advent of mass surveillance and “big
data,” visualization has become a powerful strategy of knowledge production.
The course will examine a range of visual artifacts, both
still and moving (photographs and other images, paintings, videos, and film, as
well as scientific “visualizations”) from three complementary perspectives:
• a semiotic
perspective: the working of the visual sign itself
• a systemic
perspective: visuality as a communication system that involves specific
technologies, media, modes, and techniques of production, reproduction,
manipulation, circulation, and reception
• a
rhetorical/communication perspective that explores psychological, historical,
and cultural practices of seeing and looking, persuasive effects of visual
artifacts, as well as their deployments in politics, culture, art, advertising,
and knowledge discovery.
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