ENC 4218 Fleckenstein Fall 2022

Focusing on the proliferation of visual technologies in the United States during the long nineteenth-century, this iteration of ENC 4218 explores the connections between visual media, especially those considered considered “toys” or parlor entertainment, and the rhetorics of social change. It frames that exploration with a visual-material orientation that encompasses rhetorical and media-specific analysis. In so doing, the course challenges even as it embraces dominant theories of visual rhetoric, which emphasize the visual or the visual-verbal interface extracted from the materiality of the medium enabling both.

The course is project-driven, involving extensive work with both current scholarship and archival databases. Students will select a visual technology (from the magic lantern to various forms of photography, including everything from the daguerreotype to the kinetoscope) and an issue (including, but not limited to, the Dress Reform movement, the Sanitary Revolution, woman suffrage, abolition, citizenship, immigration, evangelicalism, gendered identity [cross-dressing], racialization, and so forth).

Grades will be based on the following: three interconnected essays, one essay exam, one group presentation, and participation in regular class activities.