ENC 4218 Fall 2024 - Graban

Generally speaking, ENC 4218 introduces you to the principles of visual rhetoric, especially as it is enacted across diverse media, shaped by multiple genres, and designed to achieve different goals with different audiences. You learn to analyze the rhetorical function of imagery, use images to respond to and organize arguments, and create images that operate rhetorically. In our particular class this semester, we will extend that work toward the spatial, investigating genres, sites, and problems where the visual and the spatial intersect. Taking our cues from rhetorical ecologists, political geographers, and visual and spatial theorists, we'll consider the socio-spatial dialectics of monuments, memorials, archives, urban planning maps, and other situated performances around human rights. We'll look closely at visual arguments made in and about defined spaces of both conflict and celebration, reading them not only for stated and hidden agendas, but also for imaginative possibilities of how those spaces could be read into the future.