Defining Visial Rhetorics.

We cite from the cover:
"Images play an important role in developing consciousness and in establishing the relationship of the self to its surroundings. The contributors to this distinctive collection examine the connection between visual images and persuasion, or how images act rhetorically upon viewers. Chapters included here highlight the differences and commonalities among a variety of projects identified as "visual rhetoric," offering some distinct definitions of the term and exploring its potential role in rhetorical studies.
The contributors consider several diverse sites of image production—from architecture to paintings, from film to needlepoint—in order to understand how images and words work upon readers as symbolic forms of representation. Each chapter discusses, analyzes, and explains the visual aspect of a particular subject, and illustrates the ways in which its messages and meanings are communicated visually. The contributions include work from rhetoric scholars in the English and communication disciplines and represent a variety of methodologies—critical/theoretical work, textual analysis, psychological research, and cultural studies, among others. The editors, Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers, seek to demonstrate that every new turn in the study of rhetorical practices reveals more possibilities for discussion, and that the recent "turn to the visual" has revealed an inexhaustible supply of new questions, problems, and objects for investigation. As a whole, the chapters presented here demonstrate the wide range of scholarship that is possible when a field begins to take seriously the analysis of images as important cultural and rhetorical forces."
CONTENTS :
0. Marguerite Helmers and Charles A. Hill: Introduction ;
1. Charles A. Hill: The Psychology of Rhetorical Images ;
2. J. Anthony Blair: The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments ;
3. Marguerite Helmers: Framing the Fine Arts Through Rhetoric ;
4. Maureen Daly Goggin: Visual Rhetoric in Pens of Steel and Inks of Silk: Challenging the Great Visual/Verbal Divide ;
5. David Blakesley: Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock's Vertigo ;
6. J. Cherie Strachan and Kathleen E. Kendall: Political Candidates' Convention Films:Finding the Perfect Image—An Overview of Political Image Making ;
7. Diane S. Hope: Gendered Environments: Gender and the Natural World in the Rhetoric of Advertising ;
8. Janis L. Edwards: Echoes of Camelot: How Images Construct Cultural Memory Through Rhetorical Framing ;
9. Cara A. Finnegan: Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual: The Photograph and the Archive ;
10. Charles Kostelnick: Melting-Pot Ideology, Modernist Aesthetics, and the Emergence of Graphical Conventions: The Statistical Atlases of the United States, 1874-1925 ;
11. Craig Stroupe: The Rhetoric of Irritation: Inappropriateness as Visual/ Literate Practice ;
12. Greg Dickinson and Casey Malone Maugh: Placing Visual Rhetoric: Finding Material Comfort in Wild Oats Market ;
13. Andrea Kaston Tange: Envisioning Domesticity, Locating Identity: Constructing the Victorian Middle Class Through Images of Home ;
14. Sonja K. Foss: Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory ;
Author Index / Subject Index.