Rhetoric of the Image

This undergraduate seminar surveys theories and methods in visual rhetoric, an area of academic inquiry concerned with the lives of images. Inquiries will include consideration of the forms, functions, and interpretations of images. Topics explored will include the temporality, materiality, affectivity, and truth value of images. Examining an array of images—ranging from documentaries to deep fakes, fine artworks to popular advertisements, scientific diagrams to comic strips—students will learn multi- and interdisciplinary uses of visual materials as objects of analysis, evidence, exchange, and argumentation.