voi Cesas art practitioners, provide a good example of creative pedagogical scholarship.
such scholarship draws on writing and rhetoric for terminology and strategies that
foster research. For example, the ‘canons of rhetoric’ – invention, arrangement, style,
memory and delivery – are a basis for examining written and art productions, and
articulate persuasive appeals that a communicator uses: logos (arrangement, placement
of marks on a background), ethos (the believability of the ‘author’) and pathos (the
emotional impact and response to the marks because of their believability). Rhetorical
analysis of musical, written, performative and visual texts using these appeals form the
cornerstones of some us textbooks that teach writing modules to first year students in
university with the objective of widening definitions of communication. in the attempt
to create audiences capable of reading visuals, movement and sound, and of unpacking
their component parts, us- modelled universities also offer modules in visual rhetoric
or rhetorics of display. This latter module includes not just studying and producing
alphabetic texts, but also visual and multimodal ‘artefacts’ (Fortune 2002). in such a
class, students might begin by looking at how advertisers manipulate viewer responses
by building texts on the basis of:
- ethos (celebrity driver)
- logos (a fast car = a celebrated life) and
- pathos (cute dog barking in the front seat).
The objective of these modules is to create a knowledgeable rhetorical reading
within the author- audience- object context (Roberts- miller 2009) at a particular
kairotic moment.
Compiled by writing- scholars who seek to teach the multiple forms of communication
in our culture (not only alphabetic but aural, performative and visual) what is missing
from these is the voice of actual artists themselves (even if those who teach writing do
call themselves ‘compositionists’). These authors seek to explain facets of art practice
but are often researching from a Cartesian (observer) viewpoint. however, an arts
practitioner’s allopathic perspective joined to rhetorical vocabularies would enrich
these examinations, producing pedagogical knowledge about teaching students in and
out of the arts communication practices beyond the alphabetical. These same processes
could be used by students and art practitioners to examine the effectiveness of any
visual, aural or performative work, in particular their own.
For example, a reader/student artist is often asked to talk about her own work,
explaining the context. such a requirement includes not only artist’s cultural
perspectives (e.g. Cartesian) but her ability to find a narrative, and the resultant
and contributive emotions, beliefs and expectations that shape that narrative. as
it is important for art practitioners to know what they know and what they don’t,
rhetorical readings of visuals can illuminate for viewers/artists their own narrative.
if they care to think about audience, it can also illuminate others’ experience of an
artefact. marguerite helmers exemplifies a rhetorical unpacking of the painting An
Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) by Joseph Wright of derby. she focuses on
the reception by viewers whose reading of the picture is determined not only by the
success of the rhetorical appeals (logos, ethos, pathos), but also by what these ‘readers’
bring to the piece.