{"id":7,"date":"2014-07-02T10:25:22","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T10:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/photowriting\/?page_id=7"},"modified":"2014-07-02T13:59:43","modified_gmt":"2014-07-02T17:59:43","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/photowriting\/about\/","title":{"rendered":"about"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Andre Agassi and Canon told us in 1990<\/a>, image is everything. \u00a0Over the last half-century, the photographic\u00a0image has come to dominate the cultural and rhetorical landscape (where text and speech used to reign supreme), and visual literacy has become increasingly indispensable. \u00a0We are subjected to images as constantly and relentlessly as we ourselves are captured and circulated in image form; advertising offers us\u00a0images, surveillance cameras takes our images, and iPhones live somewhere in between the two. \u00a0As a way of thinking rigorously and broadly about rhetoric and writing, this course will unpack what it means to compose\u2014textually, photographically\u2014in the era of the image, as we’re surrounded by and immersed in both the products and the processes of photography. \u00a0How has the advent and near ubiquity of photography changed writing? \u00a0What literacies has it made more or less important? \u00a0How do we navigate constantly being on one end of a camera or the other?<\/p>\n

As befits both a good photographer and a good rhetorician, we will examine the relationship between writing, persuasion, and photography from multiple angles: how do visual and photographic images function rhetorically? How do they operate differently from text or speech? But also: how does persuasion, even in plain text, depend on the phenomenon of the image? How does persuasive writing conjure images in its audience’s heads, and how do those images embody or enable the act of persuasion? And: why are images so powerful in human culture, to the point that we go to war for flags, threaten violence over cartoons, and regulate or outright censor various kinds of visual depictions? What makes the image so potent, and how might it help us understand rhetoric more broadly? En route to addressing these questions, we will encounter photography, comics, painting, film, writing, speech; we will think about fiction, non-fiction, and various points in between; we will wade into debates about the production, consumption, and circulation of various kinds of images, and about what it is to live in an image society, for good or ill. In so doing, we will illuminate both the rhetoric of images and the images at the heart of rhetoric, and along the way, we will sharpen our own rhetorical, compositional, and stylistic toolkits.<\/p>\n

If the “composition” part of the “rhetoric and composition” course listing gives you nightmare visions of diagramming sentences and being quizzed on parts of speech, fear not. At this point in your academic lives, that sort of thing\u00a0is of little use to you\u2014and it’s not fun for me unless I’m feeling particularly sadistic. \u00a0(That’s the good news; the bad news is that I will expect you to have a reasonable facility with the written word, and to do the necessary work to strengthen that facility, even without quizzes looming over you.) \u00a0I believe in the value of addressing your writing and your writing styles individually, with the goal of helping you develop a credible, persuasive authorial voice\u2014I want to help you find your own identities as writers and thinkers. With that said, I will nonetheless help you with the mechanics of your writing to whatever extent the parameters of our class allow: \u00a0sloppy sentences, mixed-up words, careless punctuation, and unsophisticated language will make it less likely others will take you seriously, whether you\u2019re writing to a professor or a potential employer.<\/p>\n

Over the duration of this course, I will ask a lot of you. Above all, I will ask you to be intellectually curious \u2014to be interested and interesting. I will ask you to read, watch, and listen in ways you may not be accustomed to, and I will ask you to think critically about things you may not have thought much about before. Mostly, though, I will ask you to engage in the class, in whatever sense is most appropriate and productive for you. This will mean the obvious things\u2014coming to class prepared, keeping up with the readings, writing the papers, etc.\u2014but it will also mean actively involving yourself in class discussions, in smaller conversations with me or with other students, in draft workshops, in the class’s online spaces, and in the community at large. I don\u2019t need to tell you that you\u2019re no longer in high school, or that college will be significantly different from what you\u2019ve known and experienced before (and I don\u2019t just mean frat parties and walks of shame). It’s no longer enough to just “show up”\u2014I will ask more of you than that.<\/p>\n

For instance, I don\u2019t want to read a paper that bores you to write any more than you want to write it. As such, I urge you to choose writing topics you can be genuinely invested in\u2014things you know about and have opinions on, or things you\u2019re otherwise interested in looking into. Some of our topics for writing and discussion will likely stray relatively far from the sorts of dull, formulaic, academic essays you may have had to write in high school. Not only is that okay, it\u2019s exactly what I want out of you. In return, I will be thoroughly dedicated to helping you achieve the goals of this course; I will give you as much feedback as you need to get your writing where you want it to be, during and long after this course; and I will do my damnedest to keep this class from looking anything like the kind of dry, sleep-inducing\u00a0first-year writing class about which you may have had nightmares.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Andre Agassi and Canon told us in 1990, image is everything. \u00a0Over the last half-century, the photographic\u00a0image has come to dominate the cultural and rhetorical landscape (where text and speech used to reign supreme), and visual literacy has become increasingly indispensable. \u00a0We are subjected to images as constantly and relentlessly as we ourselves are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-7","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/photowriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/photowriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/photowriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/photowriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/photowriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/photowriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31,"href":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/photowriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7\/revisions\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/photowriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}