| Description |
In the dissertation, I use verisimilitude to explain first, how the force of visual rhetoric operates in works of art; second, for understanding how visual rhetoric influences audiences framed as both rhetorical and aesthetic viewing practices; and finally, how art is mediated in cognitive and emotional ways. Works of art call our attention to the power of these types of intercommunication because ""as often as language teaches us to see,"" Michael Ann Holly wrote, ""art instructs us in telling."" Specifically, this framework highlights that audiences of visual rhetoric rely on two types of viewing practices: first, a rhetorical practice that focuses on argument, function, and symbol; and second an aesthetic practice that focuses on the sensory, emotional, and artistic features of an image. These practices help us understand how audiences historically may have experienced works of art that evoked an emotional response and a symbolic meaning. This framework is simultaneously novel and traditional. It is novel because contemporary visual rhetoric scholarship has focused mainly on the functional and symbolic aspects of visual images and my dissertation (re)introduces aesthetic aspects of visual images in seeking to create a more holistic perspective on visual rhetoric. It is traditional because we can locate an aesthetic or visual theory in Aristotle's Rhetoric, for example in the enigmatic metaphor, bringing-before-the-eyes. In two case studies in two chapters--Comparing Pity and Fear in Rhetoric and Poetics; and The Rhetoric of Vanitas Painting--I demonstrate that the effect of this metaphor is not explicitly cognitive; but instead, a perceptive and emotional capacity. Aristotle's theory allows the audience to participate in the persuasive process and encompasses its role as the target of emotional appeals. This dissertation offers an alternative approach to the study of visual rhetoric and reminds us that we should revive an ancient perspective on rhetoric. Ultimately, I argue that rhetoric circumscribes aesthetics, which is a challenge to the conventional assumption that rhetoric and aesthetics are different phenomena. |
