---

Issue 33.2 Fall 2005, Pages 121-25
Book Reviews

Defining Visual Rhetorics, by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. 342 pages.

Reviewed by Shane Borrowman, University of Nevada, Reno

There are terms, such as process and freewrite, whose general definitions are accepted by a majority of scholars in rhetoric and composition. As Hill and Helmers make clear in their preface and introduction, visual rhetoric is not one of these shared terms. Even a cursory examination of the literature of visual rhetoric published in recent decades in long-running professional journals reveals much. Perhaps the finest and most prophetic statement ever made on the study of visual rhetoric in English came from Richard M. Gollin in 1969: “[If] we bring film study into traditional courses of literature our colleagues regard us with genial condescension, as if we were harmlessly drunk” (424). Certainly this field of study has wavered and waffled and staggered as it has moved forward, frequently stumbling back over its scholarly steps and infrequently making headway. Consider the range of topics, methodologies, and scholarly rigor represented by a random sampling from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s.

In 1971, in CCC, Richard Williamson argued that departments of English ought to combine with departments of filmmaking to allow the “student to express himself in the way he is most often communicated to” (134). William Costanzo, somewhat plaintively, echoed a piece of this argument fifteen years later, arguing that “Films are compositions, too.” At the midpoint between these two articles in CCC, College English devoted its entire April 1977 issue to considerations of “mass culture” in English studies, with individual contributions analyzing films, advertisements, and television drama and comedy. Six years later, in 1983, in only the third issue of Rhetoric Review, Robert J. Connors wrote of Cicero, font sizes, and paper quality. The list could go on, and Hill and Helmers cover much of the relevant literature in their brief introduction, including scholars as disparate as Charles Sanders Peirce and Roland Barthes (in a discussion firmly anchored in the analysis of 9/11 and its visual, rhetorical, and actual aftermath). All of these articles and their kin, with their disparate methodologies and topics of study, could be lumped together as the early literature of modern studies of visual rhetoric. But such lumping serves to prove only one important point: With a definition of visual rhetoric this broad, the term is effectively without meaning. While covering some of this same ground in its central essays, effectively anchoring itself in the literature of the field, Defining Visual Rhetorics moves the study of visual rhetoric forward in important ways, leveraging it out of the quagmire in which it has been spinning its wheels for three or four decades. Ultimately, the analyses that comprise the bulk of Defining Visual Rhetorics are as wide ranging in their topical foci as are past works on visual rhetoric, from analysis of film and advertising to analysis of memory and the politics of history/history of politics.

            On its surface, David Blakesley’s “Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock’s Vertigo” appears to be a perfect representative of the status quo in the swirling maelstrom of scholarship on visual rhetoric: an analysis of a single visual text with its scholarly oars planted in the waters of both English and film studies. But Blakesley’s contribution to Defining Visual Rhetorics (and to the analysis of Vertigo itself, for that matter) goes far beyond this simple surface level. Most significantly, Blakesley builds his argument on a definition of film rhetoric, language, and ideology—an argument that culminates in the analysis of Vertigo that is a model of this type of analysis at work. The analysis is especially skillful in its blending of text and exemplary visuals, weaving the two together into a single cohesive and coherent line of argumentation. The same can be said of Diane S. Hope’s “Gendered Environments: Gender and the Natural World in the Rhetoric of Advertising.” Although it relies less on visuals, Hope’s argument, like Blakesley’s, is firmly built upon a consideration of the argument’s operative terms, placing them in their historical context and pulling them into the analysis of masculinity and femininity in the iconography of the environment.

In one of the most intriguing analyses in this collection, Greg Dickinson and Casey Malone Maugh’s “Placing Visual Rhetoric: Finding Material Comfort in Wild Oats Market,” the analysis of visual rhetoric is extended beyond film and advertising to a consideration of place and postmodernity. Dickinson and Maugh range widely across their subject, covering topics as diverse as the dislocated self of postmodernism, the produce section of the supermarket, and the production of community at the Wild Oats market. It is an argument rooted in both the locality of the particular store under consideration and the primary scholarship of two fields: English and Communications. The latter point in particular is worthy of note, given that, historically, much of the work on visual rhetoric done in English has relied only upon previous scholarship in English.

            Continuing this analysis of “place,” Andrea Kaston Tange, in “Envisioning Domesticity, Locating Identity: Constructing the Victorian Middle Class Through Images of Home,” argues that “Victorian domesticity was importantly disseminated as a visual rhetoric that combined ideological significance . . . with physical images of homemaking in textual illustrations that reproduced this ideology in a consumable form” (277). Advancing this argument, Tange works through the most intriguing mix of visuals present in this collection, including drawings of “ladies’ work tables” in the 1844 Encyclopedia of Domestic Economy, floor plans from middle-class homes, and William Holman Hunt’s 1853 painting “The Awakening of Conscience” (with its scandalous-for-the-time portrayal of a “‘fallen woman’ at the point of moral crisis” [280]). In a very different interpretation of “place,” Charles Kostelnick, in “Melting-Pot Ideology, Modernist Aesthetics, and the Emergence of Graphical Conventions: The Statistical Atlases of the United States, 1874-1925,” writes of the development of the “visual language” of business, professional, and technical communication (215). More specifically, he examines the discourse communities in which these visual languages are developed over time for varying purposes and deployed to achieve their ends.

Focusing on more current texts, J. Cherie Strachan and Kathleen E. Kendall analyze the rhetoric of various political candidates’ convention films, tracing the development of the visual rhetoric of politics from the first live coverage of nomination conventions in 1952 to the Gore/Bush films in 2000. As with the work of Dickinson and Maugh, this work of Strachan and Kendall is—in addition to being well reasoned and researched—strong in its interdisciplinary focus. The same is true of Janis L. Edwards’s “Echoes of Camelot: How Images Construct Cultural Memory Through Rhetorical Framing,” although the more narrow focus necessitates the use of a more narrow range of scholarly sources. In addition to analyzing the construction of cultural memories of JFK, Edwards examines the “appropriation and re-presentation” of key images from the assassination, including the panic of the First Lady at the moment of the shooting and the salute young John delivers at his father’s coffin.

In “Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual: The Photograph and the Archive,” Cara A. Finnegan focuses on the frozen image in its historical context, concentrating on LOOK magazine’s visual “rhetoric of poverty” during the New Deal (208). Most usefully, Finnegan constructs “a way of doing rhetorical history of the visual that accounts for three key moments in the life of photographs: production, reproduction, and circulation” and both proposes and models an approach rich in its complexity and deeply rooted in historical, visual, and rhetorical scholarship (211).

Both Maureen Daly Goggin, in “Visual Rhetoric in Pens of Steel and Inks of Silk: Challenging the Great Visual/Verbal Divide,” and Craig Stroupe, in “The Rhetoric of Irritation: Inappropriateness as Visual/Literate Practice,” write of the tension between visual and verbal communicative methods, which, as Stroupe writes, “long predates the advent of digital culture” (244). While Goggin focuses upon the analysis of needlepoint samplers, providing along the way a brief but engaging history of this art, Stroupe focuses his analysis upon the appropriation of images on the Web, from “Plato’s Plan of Atlantis” to a creatively altered photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder. Together, the two provide complementary historical analyses and methodological approaches for the examination of visual artifacts.

            While the topics analyzed within this collection are broad and deep, the essays that bookend the collection move the scholarship of visual rhetoric in important directions and give Defining Visual Rhetorics a general cohesion that wide-ranging collections of essays often lack. The opening three chapters provide a solid foundation on which the internal essays build. In “The Psychology of Rhetorical Images,” Charles A. Hill analyzes rhetoric, psychology, and the connections between the instantiation of strong emotion and visual elements. Marguerite Helmers, in “Framing the Fine Arts Through Rhetoric,” considers the “perception and reception” that combine to make meaning in the arts (84). In “The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments,” J. Anthony Blair “address[es] the relationship among these three: rhetoric, argument, and the visual,” building smoothly and naturally upon the work of Hill (41). Blair traces the focus upon visual persuasion from Aristotle onward, contrasting visual arguments with other types of arguments and concluding, “It does not follow that visual argument is a mere substitute for verbal argument [although . . .] the visual brings to arguments another dimension entirely. It adds drama and force” (59).

            In her conclusion to this collection, Sonja K. Foss, in “Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory,” draws connections among several of the contributions to Defining Visual Rhetorics and provides a brief but summative overview of the general approaches to visual persuasion detailed throughout the book. “The chapters in this volume,” she concludes, “represent the variety that exists in the analysis of visual rhetoric and provide models for the study of the rhetorical workings of visual artifacts [and . . .] lay out the primary components of the current framework of such study” (312). For these reasons—and Foss’s characterization of the work of this collection is perfectly accurate—Defining Visual Rhetorics is both a solid introduction for new scholars to this area of study and a valuable addition to the libraries of scholars already working on the history, theory, and application of visual rhetoric.

Reno, NV

Works Cited
Connors, Robert J. “Actio: A Rhetoric of Manuscripts.” Rhetoric Review 2 (1983): 64-73.
Costanzo, William. “Film as Composition.” CCC 37 (1986): 79-86.
Gollin, Richard M. “Film as Dramatic Literature.” College English 30 (1969): 424-29.
Williamson, Richard. “The Case for Filmmaking as English Composition.” CCC 22 (1971): 131-36.