I've been thinking the past few months about the place of images in composition classes. Like the shift from black-and-white to color television in my childhood, our textbooks have turned technicolor as the dawning recognition of the importance of visual rhetoric sweeps the comp/rhet field like those waves of colored cards across a football stadium. I understand its attraction, the carnival-like appeal of all those quirky advertisements to analyze. And learning to look, of course, is a vital skill for the writer. But is making visual rhetoric the cornerstone of comp classes a service to our students, helping them make judgments in a culture saturated with images, or is it a surrender to a public discourse in which people take positions on stem cell research via youtube clips and on political candidates via 30-second Swift boat ads?
Description has always seemed to me a natural place to start, a building-block skill that fits naturally into a manageable chunky-paragraph sort of length that's handy for the beginning of the semester. It's also convenient because it lets me talk about a lot of things I want to talk about, and at a concrete level that seems student-friendly (like introducing integration in a calculus class by nestling those skinny boxes under the curve in question):
- How do we understand the world? For most of us vision comes pretty high on the list. It's important to be able to look at things: my version of Samuel Scudder's fish was an orange, in a touchy-feely lesson uncharacteristic for my ninth-grade English teacher (more the wild-haired, Shakespeare-declaiming type), who asked us to look at the texture of an orange's skin, dissect its layers, examine the arrangement of its miniature packets of juice. I wonder how many artists and scientists have such a moment they can recall, of being slowed down and told to look.
- Talking about description lets me talk about how specific details are the material (fabric, clay, whatever) out of which text is made: how varied could be the beautiful view from my window leads to the necessity of objective details. The details that comprise your character's messy room give me a window into his character and history, the (illusory) sense that I am constructing him free of yr writerly prejudices, the guilty pleasures of the voyeur. (Translation: Details make yr writing more clear, convincing, and compelling.)
- We come down, finally, to the fact that these details are made up of words, which raises the issue of diction (level of specificity, connotations, conciseness): do you live in a small house, or a minuscule domicile, or a shack?
- Description further lets me talk about the connection between these specific details and a central impression. Why and how do we select details? What exactly gives the main street in our hometown its character? How do the details help us refine our one-sentence impression? How does our obligation to evoke this feeling in our reader help to open our own eyes, to scout out the cobblestones and neon signs and dusty window displays that will best capture both what's physically there and the emotional resonance it has for us?
- It also lets me touch on the issue of organization, how best to arrange these details.
The idea, I guess, then, is that it will be easier for students to understand these concepts if couched in visual terms and that they'll be able to translate that understanding later to the more abstract connection between, say, claim and evidence. I'm not sure how valid these assumptions are... (Also, I normally use place description--perhaps try description of a person or photograph??)
It was one of those spur-of-the-moment ideas that seem inspirational until you try to implement them. I happened across Errol Morris's film Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, an odd documentary montage about four eccentrics (experts in topiary gardening, naked mole rats, lion taming, and robotics), and somehow immediately made a connection to the reading process. It's a film, initially puzzling, that invites the viewer to notice patterns and make connections. To put the pieces together to make meaning seems to demand effort on the part of the viewer, the sort of concentrated effort one might make to explicate a poem or analyze a piece of classical music. The first time I saw it, I couldn't pin down its point; meanings seemed fluid, a web of associations about animals, control, consciousness, community, order, delight. I tried to explain to my students This is what reading is like. You see all these pieces and you have to put them together. How do things connect? What are the patterns? I wanted them to struggle, then to realize finally that there were many different ways to answer the question What's this movie about?
The consensus of about 85% of them on their response papers: weird and boring.
Something else I stumbled upon was Christine Rosen's thought-provoking essay "The Image Culture" (The New Atlantis Fall 2005), a few paragraphs of which I'll quote here:
It is precisely those hidden stories in the moving image that excite critics like NYU professor Mitchell Stephens. In The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word, Stephens argues that the moving image offers a potential cure for the “crisis of the spirit” that afflicts our society, and he is enthusiastic about the fact that “the image is replacing the word as the predominant means of mental transport.” Stephens envisions a future of learning through synecdoche, using vivid and condensed images: “A half second of the Capitol may be enough to indicate the federal government, a quick shot of a white-haired woman may represent age. The part, in other words, will be substituted for the whole so that in a given period of time it will be possible to consider a larger number of wholes.” He quotes approvingly the prediction of movie director Ridley Scott, who declares: “Film is twentieth-century theater, and it will become twenty-first-century writing.”
Perhaps it will. But Stephens, like other boosters of the image, fails to acknowledge what we will lose as well as gain if this revolution succeeds. He says, for example, “our descendants undoubtedly will still learn to read and write, but they undoubtedly will read and write less often and, therefore, less well.” Language, too, will be “less precise, less subtle,” and books “will maintain a small, elite audience.” This, then, is the future that prompts celebration: a world where, after a century’s effort to make literacy as broadly accessible as possible—to make it a tool for the masses—the ability to read and write is once again returned to the elite. Reading and writing either become what they were before widespread education—a mark of privilege—or else antiquarian preoccupations or mere hobbies, like coin collecting.
For me she raises significant questions as to what our role is as writing teachers. In many ways I embrace technology, thinking that protects me against charges of rabid conservatism, but shouldn't writing teachers fight to preserve word over picture?
On the other hand, part of our challenge is to find material that engages our students, and popular culture (which is largely "image culture") does seem to fit that bill. And certainly it allows students ample room for honing analytical skills and generating plenty of their own writing. Perhaps it doesn't matter if the stimulus for writing is visual or verbal.
Barbara Ganley (whose infectious energy and curiosity and joy must illuminate a classroom) writes in her blog bgblogging of taking away words from her Middlebury students:
In a world that requires excellent communication skills, we focus on academic writing for academic audiences. And so, quite naturally, our students’ words grow tired, their phrases plucked from the jargon-cliché handbook; their sentences strings of boxcars clanking along down the page or out into the air. Even when students are excited by their ideas and genuinely wish to express them to others, they often lack an intense relationship with language, a lively engagement with style and a real audience.[...]
And so in my undergraduate writing and literature classes, I take written and spoken language away from students. I open courses with exercises involving music and image as a way to disorient these would-be writers by turning up with the unexpected. They expect to work with words; I give them images. They want to tell stories or write essays, which we do, but with no words at all before moving into language. By having to write without language, they have to examine both the ways in which images can and can’t express meaning, and how and when words work.[...]As students become more comfortable thinking visually, and thinking critically about the visual, they begin to see how stepping away from language for a moment to think about their ideas in image can help the preciseness of their diction, the development of their points, and the depth of their ideas.[...]
Once students return to words by telling the same story, now in words only, they find that their use of language is reinvigorated, every word made fresh and strange, challenging their notions of what makes a powerful statement, an effective metaphor, a moving flow of words within sentences and paragraphs.
(Barbara's post, by the way, is filled with links to a wide assortment of Web 2.0 resources.)
This set me to thinking about a post I'd written a few years ago on words and thoughts, wondering about the possibility for developing critical thinking skills in a wordless environment. What stories can be told through pictures alone? How can motivations and inner states be conveyed (e.g., through symbolic images of storm clouds or sunny meadows)? Can removing words force the "composer" to think more carefully about how claims might be posited? What visual strategies are available to convey argument? (The unexpected image, repetition of related images or juxtaposition of contrasting ones, camera angle, for starters.) Are words the white-noise distraction from some purer sort of meaning relationship? What is the difference in the quality of the blatant pathos of pictures and the pathos that attaches more surreptitiously via words' connotative hazes?
Where's William Gass when I need him??
Finally, a quote from Susan Sontag's On Photography (and no, I'm not sure how it relates):
I don't buy Christine Rosen's argument. When I first read it, what really struck me was this passage from her introduction:
"What will art, literature, and music look like in the age of the image? And will we, in the age of the image, become too easily accustomed to verisimilar rather than true things, preferring appearance to reality and in the process rejecting the demands of discipline and patience that true things often require of us if we are to understand their meaning and describe it with precision?"
Her whole essay is based on the assumption that language is itself a true thing rather than a representation, that precise enough language can transcend interpretation and misunderstanding.
Likewise, her argument is based on the assumption that verbal language use will go into decline if we turn towards images, as if we'll all stop talking. Even if we assume that film becomes the only form of writing (something I doubt), film uses language as well as images to get its meaning across, and the writing of film involves language use (scripts, discussion, etc.).
While I agree we need to think about what it means to involve images in our composition classrooms, I think Barbara Ganley takes a much better approach to the subject. We, as humans, think with both words and images, and we always have. Our visual turn isn't a turn to a visual age but a return to the use of images as well as words.
Thanks for the link to Ganley. :)
Posted by: John | June 16, 2007 at 01:16 PM
Thanks for the comments, John! First of all, let me say I think Barbara Ganley's approach sounds wonderfully stimulating, creatively inspiring, a class I would love to take myself. I'm especially fascinated by her methods of getting students to think about what words can and can't do.
But I guess I am ruminating on some questions about this turn towards the visual. What does it reveal about our aims in composition classes? Why does visual analysis belong in a composition class rather than an art class or a media course of some kind? (We could do historical analysis, sociological analysis, scientific analysis in a comp. class as well, but should we?) How useful is image analysis for our students in the context of the mostly text-based work they will do in other classes?
That connects, I guess, to my most serious reservation: my sense of how desperately most of my students need to learn how to read text of the old-fashioned verbal variety. (Maybe the fact I teach at a community college is a factor here??) I see a place for images in the comp. class, but I'm not sure how large a role they should take when I have so many other (more pressing maybe?) concerns to cover in a fifteen-week semester.
Posted by: Holly | June 17, 2007 at 11:46 AM
Holly, in terms of a composition class, I don't know how much good image analysis in and of itself. In fact, I'd argue that's not what we should be doing. Jeff Rice's critique of favoring image analysis over image production is dead on: In much of today’s pedagogy, the preference is for writing about images, not with images. The preference is still for the word. Thus, we hear Rader using the word interpretation in his review essay of visually oriented textbooks and not the word production. Thus, we hear Handa—despite sporadic references to production in her introduction to the sourcebook—stress the idea of “critical thinking” repeatedly, a concept whose origins are in reading, not in producing texts. True writing can only come from reading images, these positions state, not from making images. (The Rhetoric of Cool 135)
I'd suggest, as Jeff does, that the notion of composition sans image is deeply rooted in and tied to print culture. Cognitively, we think and make meaning through both words and images (Ganley offers one such example of how this can be harnessed in a composition classroom), and this move to banish the image from serious texts is fairly new.
We also need to remember, as Kristie Fleckenstein has pointed out, we, as compositionists, need to engage mental and verbal imagery as well as graphic imagery. It is, again, the making of images, the production of meaning through both words and images (mental, verbal, and graphic) that we should be focusing on rather than the analysis of images. (Or, rather, that should be the end goal. There's nothing wrong with the analysis of texts, verbal, visual, or verbal and visual in a composition classroom as long as its done in the service of producing texts.
I'd offer to send you a draft of my dissertation chapter on memory and imagery, which is really about memoria as a compositional art, but I'm in the middle of revising it and it's become a sprawling, out of control mess at the moment. I could send you two recent conference papers which deal with aspects of this topic.
Posted by: John | June 18, 2007 at 12:32 AM
John, it's taken me a little time to mull over what you're saying. I come at most of these issues as a writer, not a scholar, but I appreciate very much yr refs. Is this a fair nutshell version: in a comp class we may or may not choose to write about images, but we should be composing with both words and images? A few questions come to mind. How closely is this incorporation of image into composition driven by digital technologies? What is our rationale in having freshman students engage in this sort of multimodal composition (because it deepens their thinking, because it releases their creativity, because it broadens something or other--what does it help them do or do better)? Does it help them somehow to be able to write a coherent paragragh (or is our goal something different or more)? How does this relate to discipline-specific writing they will be doing later in their academic careers? (Thanks for the offer to share some of yr work! I'd love to read yr conference papers. My email address is [email protected] need to get contact info posted here...)
Posted by: Holly | June 20, 2007 at 10:04 AM
Holly,
That's a fair summary of my position. The question is, of course, what one's personal and institutional goals are for a composition class. If the goal is to write a coherent paragraph or a correct sentence, then the importance of engaging imagery would be much less than in a course in which the goals are to prepare students for the rhetorical acts they'll engage and engage in their personal, academic, and professional lives.
In part, this is driven by digital technologies, but as you'll see in my two conference papers, what we now take to be a natural separation between words and images isn't natural at all. It is, in fact, a condition that has only existed for a few hundred years and came about because of the constraints of print technology.
While mental and verbal imagery (as opposed to graphic imagery, what we generally call 'images') continue to exist in written discourse, our current understanding of their role in rhetoric is greatly truncated from what it once was. We now regard them as solely issues of style when, in fact, they were once also deeply connected to the canons of invention and memory. This truncation is largely complete by the Nineteenth Century with the breakdown of rhetorical culture and the separation of rational discourse (which we now call rhetoric) and the poetic. While this division begins earlier, I will note that Enlightenment authors had no problem with using imaginative writing, what we'd now call literature or fiction, to make their arguments. Consider, for instance, Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, Pope's The Dunciad, or Johnson's History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.
From the Classical period up through the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, one learned grammar, which includes the poetic, before one learned rhetoric (Wordsworth and Coleridge were taught this way as were Shakespeare and Milton as were Chaucer and Dante as were Cicero.... In other words, the poetic was part of rhetoric. This idea that they are two separate and distinct fields rather than two complementary, overlapping, and interacting methods of communication -- is a new idea even if it is the idea upon which modern composition studies is based. (This too, I'd suggest, basing this idea in the work of Ong, we can trace to an effect of print which brought about the end of the rhetorical age and ushered in the romantic age.)
So, in part, my argument comes from Mary Carruthers work on medieval memory which, in part, focuses on the rhetorical role of imagery in thought and discourse, and in the work of Kristie Fleckenstein in which she calls for "a double dialectic, a double vision of literacy as image and word, as imageword." And to that extent I'd argue that this isn't about digital technologies but a return to a fuller understanding of how human thought and communication actually works. In short, it's an understanding that we communicate (and think) with words and images. Sometimes we can express ideas best through words and other times we can express them best through images, and often times we express them best through words and images together -- and by images I am once again refering to mental, verbal, and grahic imagery altogether as Fleckenstein does.
Their understanding, both Carruthers and Fleckenstein, of the integral role and interplay of word and image, of an understanding of literacy being rooted in that double dialectic as Fleckenstein calls it, is supported by current research in cognitive science and educational theory. See, for instance Metaphorical Ways of Knowing: The Imaginative Nature of Thought and Expression, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, and Imagery and Text: A Dual Coding Theory of Reading and Writing -- as an NCTE publication, Metaphorical Ways of Knowing is the most accessible.)
I'll send those conference presentations.
Posted by: John | June 23, 2007 at 03:21 PM