Length:  1000 words (roughly four double-spaced pages)

Due Dates:  7.29.14 (proposal), 7.30.14 (rough draft), 8.4.14 (final draft)

 

Your task in this assignment is to choose a particular image or visual specimen (a short music video or ad, etc.) and unpack it in the terms we’ve been using, both visual and rhetorical.  Visually, you should consider all the elements of visual composition, aesthetic, and style we’ve discussed:  framing, perspective, aesthetic, color scheme, expressive qualities, use of text, and so on.  Both Understanding Rhetoric and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics will be useful to look back at here.  Rhetorically, you should be thinking about things like audience, ethos/pathos/logos, context, intent, and effect.  We seek here not just to understand whether a given image is appealing or successful in some general sense, but to unpack how it is being used rhetorically, to what ends, for what audience, under what assumptions, and so on.  The question, as always, is not what the thing in front of us means, but what it does.  What is its force in the world, intended or actual?  What is the gap between its intended force and its actual force?

The task of analysis is to break down its object and think about each of that object’s components as choices rather than as inevitable features of that object.  The analytical mind always remembers that every aspect of its object of analysis could have been otherwise, and that therefore the individual features of that object always have particular sets of effects (effects that are different from the hypothetical effects of different design choices).  The easiest way to make analytical headway is to ask what the effect would be of this or that aspect being different:  what if this image were in color?  What if it were zoomed out?  What if it were more crisply in focus?  What if the text were smaller?  What if it were framed differently?  What if it were published in print rather than online?  By breaking down an image into a series of choices, each of which has concrete and identifiable effects, you will be able to think of it as a kind of rhetorical machine, its various parts working in concert with one another to produce an experience in the person consuming the image.

The analytical task also requires that you be more charitable than you might otherwise be inclined to be.  If you don’t like a particular image, or a particular image makes you angry or uncomfortable, that shouldn’t be the end of your analysis—it should be the start, the catalyst, the thing that tells you the image is worth analyzing rather than merely consuming and abandoning.  If there are design choices or rhetorical choices made by the creator of the image that rub you the wrong way, instead of immediately dismissing them as bad or ineffective choices, try to think about what rhetorical purposes they might be serving.  This doesn’t mean you have to pretend to like or respect your object of analysis more than you actually do.  It just means that in-depth analysis depends on generosity—generosity in the sense of a willingness to spend time with a particular object, thinking about it and taking it seriously, interacting with it more deeply and thoughtfully than you would in “the real world.”

 

 

 

Some questions to think about, to kick-start your analysis:

  • For what audience does this image seem to be intended?  Where did the image appear?  How well does its intended audience match up with the actual set of people likely to see it?  What would the image’s effect be on people who might be likely to see it but aren’t necessarily part of its intended audience?
  • What are the expectations/conventions of the medium/context in which the image appeared?  Did it appear online or off?  On Facebook?  In a magazine?  If so, what kind of magazine?  Who are its subscribers?  Did it also appear in the online version of the magazine, or only in print?  Are people who don’t subscribe likely to be exposed to the image somehow?  Is it on a billboard?  If so, where?  Who’s likely to see it?  How does the image compare to other images in similar contexts?  How does it fit with or deviate from the expectations someone might have of an image in this particular context?
  • How does the image affect members of its audience overall?  What are its pathos effects, its effects on an audience’s emotional state?  What specific formal or aesthetic properties of the image can you attribute those effects to?  Are there aspects of the image that have effects different from an audience’s overall/dominant impression of the image?  What rhetorical purposes do these emotional effects serve?  Do they enhance or detract from the image’s overall rhetorical aims?  If the image makes you angry, is there a way you can understand that anger as serving a rhetorical purpose, rather than as a careless and stupid failure on the part of someone who is obviously not as smart as you?
  • What purpose is the image serving?  Is it an advertisement?  If so, is it obviously an advertisement, or does it mostly hide its commercial agenda?  Is it a political image of some sort?  Is it a public service announcement?  Is it an image that ended up serving different or bigger aims than it was initially intended to serve (e.g. many documentary/news images are captured without much of a rhetorical agenda but end up being used for various rhetorical purposes after the fact)?
  • Does the image operate purely on pathos impact, or does it have an implicit or explicit argument (a logos appeal) to it?  If so, what is the logic of the argument (e.g. “here is a cool person, and if you consume our product, you will be cool too, so maybe get with the buying!”)?  If it’s an advertising image, does it make any particular claims about the product being advertised, or is the image largely disconnected from the product?  If it’s a political image of some sort, how much does the image focus on promoting a particular logical argument or set of claims (vs., say, stirring your emotions or making you trust the brand)?
  • Is there an ethos component?  If it’s an advertising image, is there a brand visible?  How prominent is it?  Is there an implied spokesperson?  Is the point of the image to sell the product or to sell the brand?  How much does the image seem to care about what you think of its creator (or of the person or people appearing in it, if they are standing in some way for the company or organization represented)?
  • What does the image want you to do after you’ve seen it?  Is it primarily trying to change the way you feel or think about something, or is it trying to get you to take a particular action (buying a product, voting for a candidate, ceasing some behavior)?  What is its desired rhetorical impact?  What is your impression of its actual rhetorical impact?  If there is a gap between the two, to what choices can you attribute that gap?  Are there different choices the creator(s) of the image could have made, regarding some specific components of the image?  What costs and benefits would there be to those different choices?
  • What larger issues, phenomena, or debates does this image resonate with?  For instance, does it open up conversations about the use of sexual attraction in advertising, or the use of fear in politics, or the importance of branding?  Does the image contribute to larger trends?  Does it have things to say about those larger trends, or is it merely riding the wave?  This is a version of the “so what?” question I’ve mentioned in class:  if everything about your analysis of this particular object is true, so what?  What broader insights does your analysis lead us to?  What bigger things can you hook this image and this analysis up to?  (I’m not looking for “since the dawn of time, mankind has consumed images, bla bla bla”; I’m looking for a sense that you’re thinking broadly and nimbly about how the arguments you’re making here might be important to people other than the guy grading your paper.)  When we talked about Art Spiegelman’s post-9/11 New Yorker cover, for instance, we talked about the representation of violence and tragedy, we talked about the predominance of nationalist imagery in the wake of 9/11, we talked about personal vs. impersonal reactions to tragedy, we talked about the “too soon” phenomenon, and so on.

 

 

Consider, too, your voice in this paper.  The task is analytical, but that doesn’t mean your writing has to be dry.  If anything, the point of being trained in various kinds of analysis is to be able to say things that are more interesting, more thought-provoking.  Intellectual curiosity of the sort required to spend a lot of time with a particular object, asking lots of questions about it and taking it seriously, is not opposed to producing stylish, interesting, or funny writing.  It is very much of a piece with those things.

You are certainly not beholden to the five-paragraph essay structure that I’ve spent so much time in class bemoaning.  Again:  analytical doesn’t necessarily mean dry or uninteresting.  This isn’t high school, so I’m not requiring you to have a thesis statement sentence at the end of your introductory paragraph or anything like that, but at the same time, you should be clear about what you are and aren’t arguing—and your essay should be more than a checklist of answered questions about visual form.  Your writing should not just answer the series of questions listed above; it should use those questions as a jumping-off point to produce a coherent and cohesive account of the image you’re looking at, and of what larger issues that image brings up.  Good analysis opens up avenues for further thought, which is to say that ideally, your analysis of this image could serve as the start of a conversation, not just the end of one.