Visual Rhetoric and the Power of Imagery: A Brief Lesson in the Rhetorical Power of Images and the Need for phronesis and krisis in the Teaching of Visual Rhetoric

Since the ancient rhetoricians, humans have awarded imagery, the visual, and the vivid an extraordinary effect on emotions and memory. Such assumptions have led to iconophobia, iconoclasm, and myths about the special power of images. The issue of the power of pictures, however, is more complicated. As all other kinds of rhetorical utterances, the visual can be both powerful and powerless depending on the circumstances. For many pictures, the rhetorical power lies not mainly in their political deliberation, but instead in their nature as demonstrative or epideictic rhetoric: a rhetoric that does not primarily advocate immediate change, but tries to increase adherence to existing view-points, attitudes and values. Even though visual rhetoric may perform a powerful address to those who are already convinced, it does not necessarily hold much power over adversaries and sceptics. This article argues that when teaching visuality and the power of imagery, educators ought to help young pupils – and the citizenry in general – not only to decode visual communication, but also to interpret and evaluate it. The first requires knowledge about rules of visual literacy, the second requires not only critical thinking, but also situational and cultural knowledge, as well as sound judgment.

Fantastic Fauna in a Global Perspective: understanding composites in early Eurasian Antiquity

Ancient tombs and hoards across the Eurasian steppe call for a thorough revision of art-historical categories associated with pastoral societies from Mongolia to Crimea. This study focuses on one such category. “Animal style” is an umbrella term traditionally used to categorise portable precious metalwork ornamented with dynamic scenes of vigorous animal fights and entwined zoomorphic designs. With its emphasis on irregular animal anatomies and deeply rooted in a “pars-pro-toto” mode of expression, steppe imagery of fantastic fauna presents a useful case study in broader investigations of composites in the ancient world and their diffusion across cultural spheres. This study views beasts through a binary lens, the structured monsters of Greco-Roman thinkers and the organic composites of nomadic steppe artisans. In the Western canon, “composites” existed within a politically-manufactured framework of governable “otherness”, in which fantastic fauna conveys a certain tension with the exotic, unknown and uncontrollable East. Meanwhile, in the visual rhetoric of steppe artisans, monsters represented a tension with the (cyclical) shifts occurring in one's biota rather than the tumultuous events in one's constructed environment. This paper explores how the contrasting steppe pastoralist and sedentary imperial world-views came to define the various functions and meanings of “composites” in Eurasian Antiquity.

Rhetoric and Visual Argument: proposition of methodological models based on the analysis of infographics

This study proposes analytic models for multimodal genres, specifically for the infographic, based on a finished master’s research and in light of a brief literature review regarding multimodal argumentation. This study is justified by the fact that visual rhetoric is a relatively new field of investigation which still needs analytic proposals that promote the increase of studies in the area. This work, of a descriptive and qualitative nature, is grounded in theories and methodologies of the visual field (BLAIR, 2008; KJELDSEN, 2012; 2015; MATEUS, 2016; 2018; ROQUE, 2012; 2016; TSERONIS; FORCEVILLE, 2017; GONÇALVES-SEGUNDO, 2021; LEAL, 2021), and the gathering of data was based on Google Scholar through software Harzing’s Publish or Perish. The results show that, even though the procedures have been developed for the analysis of infographics, the analytic method may collaborate with the growing studies in multimodal argumentation and may be applied to other genres circulating in society

Constructing Religious Harmony through Rhetoric: An Analysis of Vivekananda's Selected Speeches

This research article reports how rhetorical elements used in the speeches of Swami Vivekananda at World Parliament of Religions supports to construct the religious harmony in the world. This study is based on qualitative interpretative research design and employs the theoretical ideas based on Richard Andrews to interpret the various rhetorical devices in his selected speeches. Furthermore, this paper analyzes the use of arguments in his speeches by using the idea developed by Stephen Toulmin and his visual rhetoric is analyzed using the idea based on Tracey Owens Patton. Findings show that use of rhetorical elements in his speeches contributes to make his arguments stronger to construct the religious harmony among the world religions despite the apparent contradiction among them. He incorporated rhetorical devices in his speeches such as metaphors, similes, parallelism, appropriate dictions and repetitions to persuade the audience to establish his claim more effectively by making simple and understandable. His rhetoric of spiritualization of religions with the support of interpretation of Vedic philosophy contributes to integrate the world religions by stating that every human being has been created equally having the body and immortal spirit with them. His visual rhetoric including attractive bodily appearance, confidence and commanding voice helped him to attract the attention of the large mass of audience towards him. Findings of this article contribute to a better understanding that appropriate use of rhetorical elements supports to make effective communication and helps to persuade the audience to achieve the goal.

The Photo-Text in the Mussolini Era

In the 1930s, Fascism’s Mythopoeia found in propaganda photobooks a comfortable space in which to configure itself. The layout of the photobooks draws on the experiments carried out by the editors of “Campo Grafico” [1933 - 1939] and by eclectic personalities like Guido Modiano; with reference to photography, on the other hand, from the modernist style developed by the amateurs of photographic circles reworking the experience gained by the European avant-gardes since the previous decade. All these innovations led to a rethinking of the usual relationship between image and text, gaining a new and a much more dynamic interaction between visual and textual. Through the analysis of some of the most important photobooks of the Fascist Era, the following article aims to show some aspects of the verbal and visual rhetoric which the Fascist regime used to generate an articulated model of the world in which to believe, even if its appearance differed radically from what one saw with one's own eyes or experienced on one's own skin every day. In propaganda photo books, the facts are emphasized, even judged, in order to construct a specious argument that leaves no room for doubt.