Tag Archives: visual rhetorics

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things

  — philosopher, historian and critic often identified as a post-structuralist interested in destabilizing meaning, undermining theoretical systems of universality, and studying ways in which knowledge is produced in particular cultural and historical moments.    In the The Order of … Continue reading

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Donald Norman The Design of Everyday Things

  Working from the assumption that design is an act of communication between designer and user and that in Western cultlure we live among objects of desire rather than objects of use, in The Design of Everyday Things, Norman focuses … Continue reading

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Elkins, James — Visual Studies

Visual Studies:  A Skeptical Introduction                                    James Elkins (art historian-School of Art                                                                                                                                      Institute of Chicago)   In Visual Studies:  A Skeptical Introduction, Elkins introduces readers to the emerging … Continue reading

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Urban, Greg. Metaculture: How Cultures Move through the World

  In this text, Urban uses the framework of circulation to investigate the ways in which culture is socially transmitted.  Urban is especially interested in the role that self-reflexivity plays in the definition and the transmission of culture.  In other … Continue reading

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Van Leeuwen, Theo — Introducing Social Semiotics

Theo Van Leeuwen  Introducing Social Semiotics   In this introduction to social semiotics, Van Leeuwen presents a rich discourse to describe the ways in which various semiotic resources communicate in specific locations and practices.  In addition, Part I offers practical … Continue reading

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Stafford, Barbara Maria — Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting

In Visual Analogy, Stafford attempts to resuscitate the visual method of analogy and encourage her postmodern readers to realize the numerous and valuable potentials of seeing same-ness in difference.  She turns toward images themselves to explain the nature and function … Continue reading

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On Perspective…Elkins, Panofsky, Crary

Panofsky, Erwin  Perspective as Symbolic Form   In Perspective as Symbolic Form, Panofsky traces the transformation of perspective in art from antiquity to modernity.  As Panofsky explains, Renaissance perspective systemized space on the canvas.  The mathematization or rationalization of space … Continue reading

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Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology (1967

  Notes from Spivak’s preface to Of Grammatology:   In the preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Spivak offers us a way to understand the conversations that OG responds to, the dense, shifting and unstable concepts that Derrida introduces in OG, … Continue reading

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McLuhan, Marshall – Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

In the first 70 pages of Understanding Media, McLuhan theorizes about the cultural implications of the turn toward electronic technology in a growing globalized arena.  He advocates for a kind of education that trains perception; afterall, in our global village, … Continue reading

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Taylor, Mark C. — Hiding

  –moves between theology, literature, literary criticism, art, architecture, biochemistry, neurophysiology, fashion, and technology   Synopisis taken from University of Chicago Press presssite:    The age of information, media, and virtuality is transforming every aspect of human experience. Questions that … Continue reading

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