Both
spatial and visual rhetorics attend to issues of boundaries. From the
structure of our classroom spaces to the margins of the page, rhetoricians
and compositionist are investigating the ways spatial and visual experiences
are impacting our work as scholars and teachers.
From the architecture of "made spaces" to our constructions
of "prairie, desert, or wetland," discursive readings of how
we live and inhabit our world are connected with our rhetorical practices
and our lives as researchers and teachers of rhetoric and composition.
How we define the "site" of our research, the "common
places" of rhetoric, or even the "classroom" all affect
our interactions with participants, texts, and students.
To
interrogate the ways we construct, deconstruct, and re-envision new
possibilities for those spaces is one of the major aims of this course.
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From
the normalized design of the traditional academic essay to the development
of multimedia work, visual design theories challenge rhetoric and composition
scholars to question what it means to "compose."
albers, white line square xi, 1966
Fundamental to our work as researchers and teachers, print-based epistemologies
must be re-assessed in light of new media forms, and even some old media
iterations. Therefore, another equally ambitious goal for this course
is to investigate the visual aspects of our work.
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With the assertion that no teacher of rhetoric and composition can ignore
our relationship to visual culture, this course also aims to study our
complex relationship to visual media and to discover ways of critically
engaging document design, multimedia, and the binary of text/image.
To this end, participants will read from a range of modern and postmodern
theorists, rhetoricians, design scholars, and compositionists and attend
to issues of space, design, visual arts, aesthetics, and more. Some
potential course readings include Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, Richard
Buchanan, Victor Margolin, David Sibley, Michel Foucault, Johndan Johnson-Eilola,
Anne Wysocki, Mary Louise Pratt, Donna Haraway, Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard,
among others. Students will articulate the ways these works inform their
understandings of spatial and visual rhetorics as applied to their teaching
and scholarship.
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