Lexis in the field of vision

Abstract

Lexis in the Field of Vision describes a composition pedagogy called Rhetorical Vision that integrates teaching about visual and verbal rhetoric. The project answers a call in the field of Rhetoric and Composition for writing pedagogies that address the increased presence of visual rhetoric in new media. This dissertation argues for a pedagogy that reclaims some older practices in the field, specifically rhetorical style, and merges these older practices with new scholarship on visual rhetoric in order to emphasize the dialogic relationship between word and image. By merging the old with the new, this integrated pedagogy teaches students to connect expressive choices with rhetorical effects. The benefit of such a pedagogy to the field lies in the fact that students have a guide for the analysis of the visual/verbal texts they find in discourse as well as for the creation of their own visual/verbal designs. To create visual/verbal texts students merge techniques of writing with elements of design to focus, frame, and position their work. This project also reports a classroom study that tested the visual pedagogy in a class of second-year writing students. Students in this study practiced analyzing and designing visual/verbal texts. The study revealed that, when they created visual designs and when they translated between visual and verbal modes, students became aware of their own literate practices. Students complicated old habits of writing, such as simply reporting their research, in favor of more sophisticated writing that included awareness of shaping visual and verbal texts for a particular audience and purpose. Studying the visual dimension of rhetoric revives rhetoric's ancient form as the study of live oratory. A revived visual rhetoric reconstitutes the ancient five-part canon, especially the canon of memory. By practicing a fully reconstituted rhetoric, that is, by including the visual and verbal as a dialogic pair, students have a broad expressive range in which to participate in public discourse. When practicing the visual and verbal as a dialogic pair, and then becoming aware of their own literate practices, students engaged in ¿literate action,¿ the negotiation of deliberate responses to complex, ever-changing modern discourse.