Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World
Trying to read the essay collection Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World edited by Carolyn Handa (2004) I picked up at C’s, A Night Full of Rain (1978) came on my TV. Wertmüller’s film jumps through some hypermedia hoops in its opening sequence, reminding me just how old most discussions of “new” media really are. I wonder if much of any consequence has really been said since the 60s. As Giancarlo Giannini attempts to slip it to Candice Bergen in front of the corpses, the scene becomes a theatrical rape, abruptly switching to a conversation backgrounded by the My Lai massacre on TV. Each time there is a sex scene, there is a Greek chorus of Italian spectators, offering visual commentary. It is downright scholarly. The book seems promising, though a bit anticlimactic, much like the film—a story told in fragments, already in progress.
In “Visualizing English: Recognizing the Hybrid Literacy of Visual and Verbal Authorship on the Web” (CE 2000) Craig Stroupe begins by noting Landow’s brief distinction between hypertext and hypermedia. Following the distinction explored by W.J.T. Mitchell in Iconology, Stroupe also notes the “tension” (as in the classical paragone) between visual and verbal modes in scholarship. The challenge of electronic discourse is then placed against this field, as the article turns to discuss the tension between Richard A. Lanham’s somewhat utopian picture of a “new literacy,” as promoted in The Electronic Word (1995), and Cynthia and Richard Selfe’s problematic look at that landscape in “The Politics of the Interface: Power and its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones” (CCC 45 1994).
The agonism continues with a discussion of Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers (as far as I’m concerned, I’m really sick of talk about that one—coming from a department full of Elbowites) as contrasted with Elizabeth Castro’s Netscape 3 for MacIntosh (a Visual Quickstart Guide). Stroupe notes the incompatibility of Elbow’s “cooking” metaphor with Castro’s recipes for creating web pages using Netscape Composer. While Stroupe notes that Elbow and Castro agree with Selfe’s construct that “literacy is power” (a feeling shared by Lanham, I might add), the disagreement is in how power should be seized in new media. Elbow’s expressivist metaphors do not mesh well with electronic discourse (big surprise). “Arguably, surfing and cooking exemplify diametrically opposed desires.” (Stroupe 22).
Next up in the theorists on parade, are Baudrillard and Genette (I’ll spare you). Then Stroupe turns to Greg Ulmer’s web essay Metaphoric Rocks. Stroupe places this in agonistic contrast with Landow’s Victorian Web as an example of how web discourse using images and texts should work. On Landow’s site, the images reinforce (or illustrate) the text, whereas in the preferred site constructed by Ulmer, the images are seen as being dialogically positioned relative to the text. I really don’t see that, myself, but Stroupe’s point is a good one. I discuss this issue at length (in a less agonistic way) in the first chapter of my thesis. I use William Blake as an example, because I think this issue is not new, nor limited to electronic discourse.
What I draw from the introductory essay of this book (and from my trip to the C’s conference for that matter) is a greater sense of what is going on inside my discipline (which I am constantly resistant to, oddly enough) regarding images and texts. I’ll have much more to say about that when I get around to discussing one of the featured sessions by Gunther Kress (who coincidentally wrote the second essay in this volume) later on. For now, I wanted to write an electronic abstract of Stroupe’s article because so many of his examples are available electronically and it is awkward flipping back and forth in the book.
The multi-modality of the book is like multi-modality in a film. Each has a targeted entry point—something that is nearly meaningless on the web, or even on television for that matter. Surf’s up!
