Browsing by Subject "Visual Studies"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "Area of Concentrated Attack": The Visual Rhetoric of Planning for the Minneapolis "Ghetto"
    (2021-05) Seltzer, Robert
    When Minneapolis established its first planning department in 1921, city planners immediately targeted an area centered on the intersection of 6th Avenue and Lyndale Avenue North. At the time, most African Americans and Jews in Minneapolis lived near 6th and Lyndale and the area was called a ghetto. In the hundred years since, city planners have used maps, photographs, and other visuals to consistently argue that the area around 6th and Lyndale is a problem that can be solved through redevelopment. This paper examines the visual rhetorics that planners have used to represent 6th and Lyndale as a ghetto. As represented by planners in Minneapolis, the ghetto is a threat, it requires massive intervention, it is a testing ground, and it is a source of land for downtown expansion.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The rhetorical potential of images in popular accounts of historical events.
    (2010-11) Scruton, William Christopher
    In The Rhetorical Potential of Images in Popular Accounts of Historical Events, I develop a methodological toolkit for analyzing persuasive visuals and use those lenses—technological, perceptual, semantic/semiotic, societal pragmatic, and inferential—to evaluate a multimodal narrative in Matthew Paris's thirteenthcentury Chronica Majora. Focusing on the sententious role of the chronicling narrative form and the moralizing purpose of the exemplars that most influenced Matthew's style, I argue that Matthew's practice of image-construction was an historiographic—not decorative—act and explore the ways in which the layout, organization, and illustration of Chronica Majora produced a mnemonic and epistemic machine—a purposeful, rhetorical encyclopedia of human experience and a guide to right behavior. Within this grounded framework, I address questions of broader import, including the cognitive functions of narrative form, the influence of socialization and enculturation in shaping the semiotic and rhetorical vernaculars of discourse communities, and the function of communicative artifacts as interfaces connecting the material domain with the intellectual lifeworlds of the producers and interpreters of communicative artifacts.