5
Rhetorical Analysis

George Miller’s masterful reimagining of a post‐apocalyptic future in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which is based on the same world as his 1979 original, Mad Max, tells the story of Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), a loner with an ambiguous backstory, and Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who is seeking to escape the mad clutches of a grotesque and despotic warlord. The tale eventually leads Max and Furiosa to return to the source of their imprisonment in a desperate attempt to bring freedom to those still living under the oppressive weight of their captors. With striking aesthetics, compelling performances by both leads, a brilliant sound and music design, and spectacular, almost entirely practical, visual effects, Mad Max: Fury Road is an exciting and surprisingly powerful piece. But it is also an allegory: an extended reflection on the nature of humanity when faced with desperation and the loss of a civil society, in this case brought about by environmental devastation fueled by greed. The film works to discomfort its viewers, dramatizing in stunning high definition an increasingly possible future, in order to prompt action from a population prodded out of its comfortable state of apathy toward violence, consumerism, and a complicity in environmental harm. And, in that sense, the film functions as rhetoric, as an attempt to shape and influence its viewers’ attitudes and actions.1

Mad Max: Fury Road stages its indictment of frivolous consumption on a number of levels. At the level of narrative, for instance, visual and verbal accounts of the resource wars and social power derived from control of commodities we now take for granted reflect the priorities of corporate and political actors toward less powerful nations or groups. With sometimes thinly veiled references to the system of social order being dictated via the resources of fuel, bullets, food, and water, the film explicitly rebukes political relationships to resources and power projection. Its repeated aesthetic portrayals of the grittiness of violence, lack of resources, and the social ordering of patriarchy are viscerally reinforced by its camera work and editing, its use and portrayal of gendered violence, and the use and misuse of resources throughout the narrative. In short, Mad Max: Fury Road urges audiences to viscerally fear a world of more scarce resources, puts faces to names for what desperation means even for “civilized” people, and reminds us what it is to walk down the path of violence as a means of resolving social ills. The attempt to move audiences is by no means unique to this film, however. As this chapter demonstrates, our whole media landscape is rhetorical.

Rhetorical scholars of the media, alternatively referred to as Rhetorical critics, analyze texts for the ways they encourage audiences to inhabit certain moods, adopt certain attitudes, and undertake certain actions. These scholars view texts as complex webs of interrelated parts that work together to influence consumers in particular ways. We begin this chapter with an introduction to the concept of rhetoric, emphasizing its inherently suasory character. Then, we illustrate how signs – the basic building blocks of language and most other forms of rhetoric – create meaning by examining the works of three important philosophers of the subject. Next, we consider how signs in complex combination form media texts, whose various structures invite and elicit particular responses from audiences. Finally, we conclude by examining how the aesthetic elements of media such as sound and color move audiences at a bodily level through the generation of affect.

Rhetoric: An Overview

The tendency to view popular media products like the film Blade Runner 2049, or the Netflix series Stranger Things, or the song “This Is America,” or the video game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds as mere entertainment obscures the fact that media messages inevitably persuade as well as entertain us. Media messages cannot help but convey meanings, and meanings are never neutral or objective. Consequently, films, television shows, songs, video games, and so on are constantly inviting us to adopt certain attitudes, values, and beliefs, while simultaneously encouraging us to dismiss and discount others. This is because all media products are rhetorical.2 Historically, rhetoric referred to the ancient art of oratory, or as Aristotle famously defined it, “an ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion.”3 The art of rhetoric as practiced by Greek politicians in the fifth century BC may seem distant and unrelated to the art of rhetoric as utilized in the spectacular images of Avengers: Endgame (2019). But both instances rely on symbols to influence what and how audiences think and feel. Indeed, if we were to update Aristotle’s definition, we might simply define rhetoric as the use of symbols by humans to influence and move other humans.4

If what is meant by the idea that media products are rhetorical is still not entirely clear, then consider Michael Moore’s controversial Where to Invade Next (2015). The film takes a highly critical look at the role played by big money, oil, and the increasingly unmasked ambition of the military industrial complex surrounding US‐led military efforts around the globe. Like Moore’s previous artistic endeavors (Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko, and Capitalism: A Love Story), Where to Invade Next is a documentary. But many critics, and especially those on the political right, responded to it with vitriol and venom because of its biased, one‐sided presentation of events, an offense that was only further heightened by the filmmaker’s insistence on its documentary nature. The outrage of critics stemmed, at least in part, from the “perception” that documentaries ought to be objective. But as we have already noted, all symbols are value‐laden and thus all messages, as symbolic creations, are necessarily biased.5 As Kenneth Burke explains, “Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality.”6 Thus, it is naïve to think that communication in any form, be it a documentary film or scientific monograph, can be anything other than biased and suasory.7

Theories of the Sign

In 1993, the Sweden‐based pop group Ace of Base released their smash hit, “The Sign,” which spent 6 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States. Though the song owes its success to its infectious dance beat, our interest is in its mind‐numbing lyrics and popular refrain, “I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes / I saw the sign.” As cheesy and clichéd as these lines may be, they succinctly describe the basic operation of signs. A sign is something that invites someone to think of something other than itself, such as the way an image of a person invites one to think of that person or the way the unique letter combination d / o / g invites one to think of a four‐legged canine. Since nearly everything has that potential, virtually anything can function as a sign. When multiple people agree on what a sign refers to, we say that it has shared meaning. Shared meaning is, of course, what makes human communication possible. Without it, no social structures or institutions could exist. Moreover, since no sign (no matter how clear it may seem) can guarantee that everyone will interpret it the same way (i.e. understand it to be referring to the same thing), communication is an extremely fragile thing. Think of all the times in your life you have said something to someone that was intended to be innocent, but that was (mis)interpreted as an offense. Signs are significant, then, because they are the fundamental building blocks of meaning and, hence, communication. In this section, we consider how three prominent scholars have theorized the sign: Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Roland Barthes.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is generally regarded as “the founder of modern linguistics,”8 a title he earned by shifting the study of language away from the historical roots (philology) and changing meaning of specific words (semantics) and toward its nature as a structured system. Though Saussure never wrote a book, his lectures on linguistics at the University of Geneva were compiled and published posthumously in 1915 under the title of Course in General Linguistics. Saussure called his unique approach to linguistics semiology, which he defined as “a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life … It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them.”9 Since Saussure understood language as a system of signs, he began by asking what a sign is and what rules it obeys. All linguistic signs, he argued, are a combination of signifier (signifiant) and signified (signifié). The signifier, or sound‐image, refers to the material form of a sign as perceived by the senses, such as the word “dog” as heard by a listener. The signified, or mental concept, is the idea evoked by the signifier; in this case, the idea of “dogness.” Note that an actual dog is not part of this equation. Together, the signifier and signified constitute a sign, which Saussure designated in the manner shown in Figure 5.1.

For Saussure, the linguistic sign has two defining traits. First, signs are arbitrary,10 meaning there is no natural correspondence, no necessary relationship, between the signifier and signified. It is precisely because there is no inevitable or inherent link between signifiers and signifieds that the idea of “dogness” can be conveyed by different signifiers: dog (English), perro (Spanish), chien (French), cane (Italian), Hund (German), 狗 (Chinese). We could even invent our own word for “dogness,” such as plink, and if we agreed that plink meant “dogness,” then we would have a new signifier. It is this principle of arbitrariness that allows Trekkers (fanatical fans of Star Trek) to invent and speak in alien languages like Klingon, for instance. The constant creation and addition of new words, like “Truthiness,” and the changing meaning of existing words, like “woke” (which went from meaning “not sleeping” to also meaning “aware of and alert to social injustices”), highlight the arbitrariness of signs. “The fact that the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary means, then,” elaborates Culler, “that since there are no fixed universal concepts or fixed universal signifiers, the signified itself is arbitrary.”11 This is to say that while the terms dog and perro may both evoke the mental idea of “dogness,” “dogness” is itself understood differently in different cultures.

Diagram of constituents of a sign depicted as an oval horizontally divided into 2 labeled “Signified” (top) and “Signifier” (bottom) with an upward arrow on the left and a downward arrow on the right.

Figure 5.1 Constituents of a sign: the signifier and signified.

The second key trait of the linguistic sign is linearity. Since the signifier, being auditory, is unfolded solely in time, it is impossible to utter two distinct linguistic signs simultaneously. Go ahead: try to say two different words at exactly the same time. It is not possible. Saussure recognized that this trait does not hold true for visual signs, which can, in fact, “exploit more than one dimension simultaneously.”12 So, when you look at a photograph, you can process multiple signs simultaneously. Saussure regarded the principle of linearity to be a significant one because it means that signifiers operate in a temporal chain, which if reordered, changes the meaning of what is being said.

Having identified the basic character of signs, let us turn now to Saussure’s methods for investigating the rules that govern them. To understand and appreciate his perspective, we need to introduce three additional ideas: langue versus parole, synchronic versus diachronic, and difference. For Saussure, it is important to distinguish between la langue, the linguistic system, and parole, individual speech acts or utterances (i.e. actual manifestations of the sign system). To study la langue is to study the rules and conventions that organize the system, while to study parole is to study specific uses or performances of language. Saussure was a strong proponent of the former, which he believed to be the proper goal of linguistics. Another distinction of significance to Saussure was that between synchronic and diachronic analysis. Synchronic analysis, which was Saussure’s principal commitment, concerns the state of language in general: the linguistic system in a static state. It aims to illuminate the conditions for the existence of any language by examining the rules of combination and substitutability within a system. Diachronic analysis, or evolutionary linguistics, by contrast, concerns the origins of languages and changes in sound or pronunciation over time (phonology). Since such changes are found in parole, Saussure did not see diachronic analysis as a suitable method for investigating la langue.

The final key concept in Saussure’s science of signs is difference. Saussure astutely recognized that signs signify by virtue of their difference (i.e. distinctiveness) from other signs. The word “dog” can signify because it sounds and looks different than the words “dig,” “frog,” and “bag.” Though this may seem like an elementary observation, its implications are profound. It suggests that if we cannot distinguish one sign from another, then we cannot communicate. This is what occurs when someone is speaking too softly or mumbling; though we can still hear sounds, we can no longer distinguish among them. Similarly, the difficulty in reading a professor’s sloppy handwriting arises from an inability to distinguish the signs he or she has produced from other signs. As long as a sign sounds or looks different from other signs, it can be used to communicate. The specific character of such differences is unimportant so long as their meaning is socially agreed upon. It does not matter, for instance, what a bishop looks like in the game of chess, only that the bishop, which is bound by certain rules, looks different from the other pieces. Indeed, if one of the bishops in a chess set were lost, the game could still be played using a bottle cap or some other non‐chess object so long as both players agreed the bottle cap represented a bishop and was, thus, limited to a bishop’s movements. The game could not be played, however, if an extra pawn were made to stand in for the missing bishop, since the players would not be able to differentiate that particular pawn (i.e. the one representing the bishop) from the game’s other pawns.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)

At about the same time Saussure was putting forth his theory of signs in Europe, a Harvard‐trained American philosopher by the name of Charles Sanders Peirce was developing his own. Peirce called his program semiotic (semiotike), which he defined as “the quasi‐necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.”13 Unlike Saussure’s theory, which was conveniently compiled into one book, Peirce’s work on signs spans across his writings and intersects with a diverse array of topics. It has been distilled from the eight‐volume Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1932. Peirce’s semiotic differs greatly from Saussure’s semiology because it both repudiates the principle of arbitrariness and expands the category of signs to include all modes of human communication (not just language). It is based upon the triadic relation between sign, object, and interpretant.

“A sign, or representamen,” as Peirce called it, “is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.”14 The “equivalent sign” it creates in a person’s mind is known as the interpretant, and the something that the sign stands for is its object. In this scheme, the representamen (sign) loosely corresponds to Saussure’s idea of the signifier and the interpretant to his notion of the signified. For Peirce, the image or picture of a dog functions as a sign that refers to an object, a real dog, and creates an interpretant, a mental interpretation of the dog (Figure 5.2).

Diagram of Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory depicted as a triangle with each tip having an image of a dog with labels sign, object, and interpreter.

Figure 5.2 Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory.

Peirce classified signs into three categories: icons, indices, and symbols. Iconic signs operate according to the logic of similarity or likeness; icons are representamens that structurally resemble the objects they stand for. Examples include diagrams, maps, photographs, and other types of images. Indexical signs are linked by cause or association to the objects they represent. Since smoke indicates fire, it functions as an indexical sign for fire. Peirce noted that “anything which focuses the attention is an index,” citing the example of a “rap on the door,” because it draws our attention to someone’s arrival.15 Symbols, the third category of signs, are linked to their corresponding objects purely by social convention or agreement; symbolic signs are learned rather than intuited. As this is how language works, Peirce argued that “All words, sentences, books, and other conventional signs are Symbols.”16 It should be noted that Peirce did not regard these three categories as mutually exclusive, believing instead that certain signs can function in more than one way.

Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

Roland Barthes has been described as “the most important French thinker to emerge from the post‐war period.”17 Despite this ringing endorsement, Barthes was famous not so much for proposing intellectually revolutionary ideas as for refining and expanding upon the ideas of others. As we will see, Barthes’ theory of signs, which we term the signifying system to distinguish it from semiology and semiotics, draws heavily upon the work of both Saussure and Peirce. The signifying system grew out of Barthes’ fascination with how “cultural” practices and beliefs are “naturalized” (i.e. made to appear natural), an idea he first began to explore in his writings on myth (see especially Mythologies). Over time, Barthes increasingly began to view myth through the lens of signification, and in particular through Saussure’s conception of signs as signifier and signified.

To demonstrate the relation of myth to Saussure’s scheme, Barthes famously introduced a distinction between denotation and connotation in Elements of Semiology (1964). Denotation describes first‐order signification, or what Barthes called the first “plane of expression.”18 The denotative plane involves the literal or explicit meanings of words and other phenomena. At a purely denotative level, for instance, the word “lion” (signifier) evokes the mental image of a large cat (signified). But Barthes recognized that meaning does not end there, that the signifying system is characterized by process, not product.19 When one hears the word “lion,” one may briefly form the mental image of a large cat, but that mental image (as a signifier itself) will evoke still other associations (new signifieds), such as “courage” and “pride.” This second plane of expression is what Barthes called connotation. Connotation is second‐order signification and operates at the level of ideology and myth. While “dog” and “perro” may evoke similar mental images (i.e. denotative meaning), the connotative meaning of “dog” can vary greatly from culture to culture (everything from “companion” or “family member” to “pest” or “food”). Figure 5.3 visually depicts the relation of denotation to connotation.

Diagram of relation of a denotive sign to a connotative sign depicted as stacked rectangles labeled “Signifier” and “Signified” (top); “Denotative sign, Signifier,” and “Signified” (middle); and “Connotative sign” (bottom).

Figure 5.3 The relation of a denotative sign to a connotative sign.

The advantage of Barthes’ signifying system over Saussure’s semiology is not that it illustrates that meaning is always cultural (Saussure was well aware of this fact), but that it emphasizes that meaning is never final or closed.

Like Peirce, Barthes recognized that signs need not be linguistic. Moreover, he agreed that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is not really arbitrary so much as it is unmotivated.20 But even in the case of image‐based signifying practices such as photography and cinema or object‐based signifying practices such as clothing and food, Barthes found value in the signifier/signified binary. Thus, when studying images, Barthes would isolate the signifiers and signifieds operating on both the denotative and connotative planes of expression. One of Barthes’ most well‐known analyses is of an advertisement for Panzani products that appeared in a French magazine (see Figure 5.4). Barthes argued that the advertisement comprised three messages (codes): a linguistic message (printed text), a denoted image (non‐coded iconic message), and a connoted image (coded iconic message). The linguistic message performed the function of anchorage, limiting the (potentially infinite) meanings the image might have by “directing” the reader through the visual signifieds.21 In other image‐based forms such as cinema or comic strips, the linguistic message can also perform a relay function, in which the words complement and reinforce the images. For Barthes, the denoted image is analogical in nature, the visual signifier “tomato” referring to the mental idea of “tomato‐ness,” the visual signifier “net” referring to mental idea of “net‐ness,” and so forth. Perhaps less obvious is the meaning of the connoted image, which evokes the ideas of freshness or return from market, Italianicity, total culinary service, and “still life.” Just as the elements in this image derive their meaning in relation to one another, Barthes believed that each element within a signifying system is dependent upon every other element in that system for its meaning. In other words, not only are the individual signs in a message key to its meaning, but so too are their arrangement in particular texts and rhetorical structures.

Texts and Rhetorical Structures

Signs, of course, rarely exist or function in isolation. Rather, they are combined with other signs to form media products or texts. “A text,” according to Barry Brummett, “is a set of signs related to each other insofar as their meanings all contribute to the same set of effects or functions.”22 The Panzani advertisement discussed in the previous section (see Figure 5.4), as well as songs, internet sites, video games, television shows, and movies, can all be thought of as media texts because the individual signs that make them up are strategically structured to elicit particular responses from listeners and viewers. Though the organizational pattern of signs that can exist in a text is potentially infinite, there are some general rhetorical structures that are shared by many, if not all. This section focuses on four rhetorical structures in particular: clusters, form, genre, and narrative.

Panzani advertisement displaying ingredients such as raw pasta, parmesan, sauce, tomatoes, garlic, etc.

Figure 5.4 Panzani advertisement.

Source: Courtesy of Panzani.

Clusters

Perhaps the most basic rhetorical structure in texts is the cluster, or the way individual signs are associated with and dissociated from one another. Expounding on this idea, Kenneth Burke writes, “Now, the work [text] of every writer [or media producer] contains a set of implicit equations. He uses ‘associational clusters.’ And you [the critic] may, by examining his work [text], find ‘what goes with what’ in these clusters: what kinds of acts and images and personalities and situations go with his notions of heroism, villainy, consolation, despair, etc.”23 To understand how the clusters in a text are working rhetorically, the critic should begin by identifying the key signs within the text: those signs that are privileged through repetition, intensity, or prominence. In the Candie’s Fragrances advertisement shown in Figure 5.5, for instance, the critic would classify the two perfume bottles as key signs because they are bright, prominently placed in the center of the image, and the focus of the model’s attention, a technique designed to focus our attention on them as well. The critic would then ask, what other signs are associated with (i.e. cluster around) these key signs? This would likely lead her or him to note that the two perfume bottles are swimming in an ocean of condoms. The implicit suggestion, of course, is that wearing Candie’s Fragrances will lead to sex … lots and lots of sex! The absence of certain signs or clusters in a text may also be central to its appeal. Notice in the Candie’s ad that there is nothing in the medicine cabinet besides condoms and perfume. Other objects (i.e. visual signs) that one might expect to find in a medicine cabinet such as creams, deodorants, and aspirin are all conspicuously missing. These absences are not accidental. Rather, they are strategic, as the advertiser does not want to risk consumers associating Candie’s Fragrances with rashes, body odor, headaches, and upset stomachs. Finally, the critic explores whether the particular clustering of signs in a text fosters a positive, negative, or ambivalent valence toward the key signs. In the case of the Candie’s Fragrances ad, the association of the product with condoms, a half‐naked Alyssa Milano, and a pristine, white bathroom all work to make the product more desirable by associating it with a series of positive signifiers.

Image described by caption and surrounding text.

Figure 5.5 Candie’s Fragrances advertisement.

Source: Courtesy of Iconix Brand/Candie’s Fragrances.

Form

A second prominent rhetorical structure in texts is form. Form, explains Burke, is “an arousing and fulfillment of desires. A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, [and] to be gratified by the sequence.”24 Simply stated, form is the creation and satisfaction of desire. When a gun is drawn by a character in a film, for instance, it fosters a desire for violence. Though the violence may not occur immediately, which further heightens our desire for it (by withholding or prolonging fulfillment), it must occur eventually; otherwise, our desire goes unfulfilled (this is known as “bad form”). If you have ever had a friend break a promise to you, then you know just how frustrating and disappointing bad form can be. Form is at play in virtually all messages. Consider the opening sentence of this paragraph: “A second prominent rhetorical structure in texts is form.” This sentence generates a desire to know what “form” is, which the next sentence graciously affords by providing a definition. Similarly, the sentence that immediately precedes the one you are currently reading fulfills the desire to know the significance of the first sentence in this paragraph: a desire created by the phrase, “Consider the opening sentence of this paragraph.”

Form comes in a variety of, for lack of a better word, forms. Burke proposes that there are four general varieties of form: progressive form, repetitive form, conventional form, and minor or incidental form. Progressive form describes the way a story advances step by step, each step following logically from the previous one. “The arrows of our desires,” Burke writes, “are turned in a certain direction, and the plot follows the direction of the arrows.”25 Progressive form is particularly evident in television crime dramas such as CSI. Each episode begins with a homicide, which (necessarily) leads to the search for a killer. As clues are gathered and analyzed over the episode, suspects are slowly eliminated until the culprit is finally revealed and confronted. Though there may be brief “misdirection” along the way, ultimately the clues will point to the guilt of one individual. The second major type of form, repetitive form, “is the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises. It is the restatement of the same thing in different ways.”26 Repetitive form can be seen in the actions of most characters on television; they are recognizable to us as “characters” precisely because they repeat the same behaviors over and over again. Though the context changes, BoJack Horseman repeatedly makes absurdly self‐destructive decisions on the Netflix show of the same name, Tyrion Lannister repeatedly violates both audience and in‐universe expectations on Game of Thrones, and Rick Sanchez repeatedly treats others in exceptionally disrespectful ways on Rick and Morty. Each time we witness these behaviors, it heightens our appetite to see them repeated in a new context. That they are repeated is extremely rewarding because it satiates an appetite created by repetition.

Conventional form, the third major variety, is not so much an appeal within the text (as progressive and repetitive forms are) as it is an appeal of the text. When two friends are trying to decide what movie to go see and one of them says, “I’m in the mood for a romantic comedy,” she or he is articulating a preference based on conventional form. One way of classifying media texts is according to the structural and aesthetic conventions they share. Horror films are scary, action films are thrilling, and romantic comedies are funny, or at least we “expect” them to be. We often select the media texts we do because we desire a particular set of conventions at a particular moment in time. When someone is depressed and chooses to listen to a sad, sappy love song, it is because that type of song fulfills the desire to wallow in self‐pity. The fourth and final variety of form, minor or incidental form, is sort of a catch‐all category. It includes the brief, frequently literary devices that may appear within a text, such as metaphor, paradox, reversal, contraction, expansion, and so on. Minor forms are what allow us to take pleasure in segments, sections, or pieces of larger texts. One may delight, for example, in a particular scene from a film independent of the whole because it creates and fulfills a desire all its own.

Genre

Another way to investigate what media texts mean and how they function rhetorically to move us is through the concept of genre. A genre is a class or constellation of messages that share discernible stylistic or formal (syntactic), substantive (semantic), and situational (pragmatic) characteristics.27 The idea that media messages can be categorized into identifiable genres according to the stylistic and substantive traits they share may seem rather obvious. After all, popular cinematic genres like romantic comedies, psychological thrillers, and horror films each have readily identifiable plot, setting, and character elements. The broad recognizability of these elements allows for the near continuous release of film parodies like Scary Movie (2000), Not Another Teen Movie (2001), Date Movie (2006), Epic Movie (2007), Superhero Movie (2008), and InAPPropriate Comedy (2013), as well as full‐blockbuster twists on conventional formulas such as the very R‐rated Deadpool, which, ironically, received its own twist in turn with a PG‐13 family‐friendly edit for the 2018 holidays. What is less obvious, but no less important, is that genres possess stylistic and substantive similarities because they speak to typical or recurrent situations in familiar ways. In other words, genres function as modes of social action; they are patterned responses to situations that audiences perceive as somehow similar or comparable. Romantic comedies are recognizable as romantic comedies, in large part, because they address common relational challenges in formulaic ways – ways that differ noticeably from how Westerns define and frame relational challenges.

The study of genre is typically approached in one of two ways: inductively or deductively. Genres that are arrived at inductively are created by drawing general conclusions based upon the analysis of specific instances. An inductive approach typically corresponds to what are known as historical genres. Historical genres, which are rooted in the observation of shared traits across media texts, are well known to most people. Popular television genres such as soap operas, game shows, reality TV, sitcoms, and dramas (crime, medical, and legal) are common examples of historical genres. Let’s take a closer look at one example: the talk show. Like other television genres, the talk show has an easily identifiable set of formal and substantive characteristics. For instance, it features a host who interviews guests on a specific topic, incorporates unexpected or surprising elements, involves the interaction of a studio audience, and is seemingly spontaneous and unscripted. But, as anyone who regularly watches talk shows will tell you, not all talk shows are equal; there are meaningful differences, for example, between Maury and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, despite each being a daytime talk show. Studying these shows and others like them allows us to refine our taxonomy and to distinguish between the “trash” talk show and the “confessional” talk show. Though similar in many respects, the trash and the confessional talk show are distinct historical (sub)genres typified by the characteristics shown in Table 5.1.

As we noted at the outset of this section, genres are based not only on the stylistic and substantive traits they share, but also on what they do (for audiences) – on the social action they perform in response to recurring situations. Genre operates, then, in much the same manner as does Burke’s notion of conventional form. Viewers come to tabloid (trash) and confessional talk shows expecting certain things to happen, and to the extent that those things do happen, the shows are formally rewarding. But, even more basically, audiences are drawn to these genres in the first place because of the precise manner in which they deal with typical situations and, thus, fulfill particular psychological needs and desires. From this perspective, we might conclude that one reason trash talk shows are appealing is because, in showing us everyday people with outrageous problems, they reassure us that our lives are pretty normal and uncomplicated by contrast. Alternatively, confessional talk shows are appealing because, in showing us celebrities with ordinary problems, they comfort us with the knowledge that all people share in similar struggles. So, while both genres address the difficulties of daily life, they do so in dramatically different ways.

Table 5.1 Comparison of trash and confessional talk shows

Trash talk show Confessional talk show
Host as (circus) ring leader Host as (personal) therapist
Everyday people with outrageous problems (sensational, salacious, and socially taboo) Celebrity personalities with ordinary problems (typical, normal, and common)
Entails conflict and confrontation among guests Entails friendly, sit‐down interviews with guests
Young studio audience that hoots, shouts, and chants Middle‐aged studio audience that asks questions and shares experiences
Contentious, carnivalesque culture Feel‐good, celebrity‐friendly gossip culture
Examples: The Jerry Springer Show, Maury, The Ricki Lake Show, The Jenny Jones Show Examples: The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The View, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show

A second way to study genre is deductively, working from a set of general propositions to specific conclusions. In contrast to an inductive approach, as reflected in historical genres, a deductive approach generates and tests theoretical genres. Whereas historical genres are based upon generalizations that emerge from the observation of multiple cases (such as our analysis of talk shows), theoretical genres are rooted in the application of general principles to individual instances. To clarify this distinction, consider Diomedes’ classification of literary works into three key genres during the fourth century AD: those in which only the narrator speaks, those in which only the characters speak, and those in which both speak. “This classification,” observes Russian literary scholar Tzvetan Todorov, “is not based upon a comparison of works to be found in the history of literature (as in the case of historical genres), but on an abstract hypothesis which postulates that the performer of the speech act is the most important element of the literary work, and that according to the nature of this performer, we can distinguish a logically calculable number of theoretical genres.”28 Film scholar Jane Feuer further clarifies the difference between historical and theoretical genres, noting that the former are “accepted by culture” and the latter are “defined by critics.”29

Narrative

A fourth rhetorical structure common to media texts is narrative. Narrative describes a series of real or fictitious events that occur in (often chronological) succession. For narrative theorist Gérard Genette, narrative can be divided into three levels: story (histoire), discourse (récit), and narrating (narration). To appreciate the rhetorical complexity of narrative, it is worth looking at each of the three levels in greater detail.

  1. Story refers to what happens to whom in a narrative. It comprises events and existents.
    1. Events. The particular events that occur within a story are further divided according to the function they perform: kernels (or nuclei) are the key nodes or hinges that actively contribute to a story’s progression, while satellites (or catalyzers) are the more minor plot events that fill in the narrative. The distinction between kernels and satellites becomes evident when a story is condensed into its simplest form. Take the following as an example:
      Villain kills victim. Victim’s body is discovered. Hero begins search for villain. Hero discovers clues to villain’s crime. Hero captures villain. Villain is punished.

      This is what a story might look like if it were totally stripped of all satellites. Each of these events functions as a kernel because it formally necessitates subsequent cardinal events. The endless array of minor events that connect these kernels will likely be satellites. After dispatching the victim, for instance, the villain might drive home (satellite), attempt to destroy any evidence of the crime (satellite), and return to work (satellite). These events are satellites because they can be substituted with other events or even deleted without altering the basic story.

    2. Existents. Stories are also made of existents, which include characters (actants) and indices (informants and setting). Characters are often classified with respect to the actions they perform within a story. In his study of Russian fairy tales, Vladimir Propp identified seven typical characters: hero (seeker or victim), villain, donor (provider), helper, princess (sought‐after person), dispatcher, and false hero.30 This list was later streamlined by A.J. Greimas into three pairs – subject/object, sender/receiver, and helper/opponent – which he argued account not just for the characters in fairy tales, but for those in stories in general.31 What audiences know about characters – specific details such as their age, hair color, and favorite food – are known as informants, while the location and overall atmosphere in which characters find themselves are called the setting.
  2. Discourse, according to Genette, describes the actual words, written or spoken, used to tell a story. Since the narratives in contemporary media are increasingly visual, we would add images or pictures to this category (as is evidenced by the silent film era, words are not a requirement for storytelling). Because signs (i.e. words and images) are never neutral, the specific discourse of a narrative is central to its meaning. The meaning of the event, “boy meets girl,” is significantly altered if, in the telling, the narrator says, “a seedy‐looking man wearing a dark overcoat confronts Gillian in a dimly lit alley,” rather than, “a businessman approaches Gillian at the bar and politely offers to buy her a drink.” When analyzing how a narrative functions rhetorically, a critic ought to attend not just to what happens and to whom (i.e. story), but also to the precise language used (i.e. discourse).
  3. Narrating, the third level at which we can approach narrative, refers to the actual act of recounting (the situation within which discourse is uttered). It involves questions such as who is speaking, from what perspective or point of view, and in what relation to the listener/audience. To address these questions, Genette proposed analyzing narration along three axes: tense, mood, and voice.
    1. Tense. Drawing upon the work of Todorov, Genette understood tense to refer to narrative temporality. Tense, or the temporal relations of the narrative, can further be divided into the categories of order, duration (speed), and frequency. The category of order has to do with how time unfolds for the narrator, who may or may not also be a character in the story. Narrators can transport audiences to the past through flashbacks (analepses) or into the future through flash forwards (prolepses), or they can create anticipation for future events through character premonition. The concept of reach refers to how far back or ahead the events the narrator recalls or anticipates lie. The second category of narrative temporality is duration or speed, and it involves the relation between the period of time described (story‐time) and the period of time required for the telling (discourse‐time). According to Sarah Kozloff, there are five possible relations between story‐time and discourse‐time:32
      • scene: discourse‐time and story‐time are roughly equal (such as the technique utilized during the first season of the television series 24).
      • summary: discourse‐time is shorter than story‐time (such as the way a week can pass in an hour‐long program).
      • ellipsis: discourse‐time is zero (such as the way 2 or 3 weeks can pass with a simple cut in film or television).
      • stretch: discourse‐time is longer than story‐time (slow motion).
      • pause: discourse‐time is longer than story‐time, which is zero (freeze‐frame).

      Frequency, the final category of temporal relations, refers to the number of times a single event or incident is recounted by the narrator. Genette noted four potential expressions of frequency: narrating once what happened once (e.g. “Yesterday, I went to bed early”); narrating n times what happened n times (e.g. “Monday, I went to bed early. Tuesday, I went to bed early. Wednesday, I went to bed early”); narrating n times what happened once (e.g. “Yesterday, I went to bed early; yesterday, I went to bed early; yesterday, I went to bed early”); and narrating one time (or rather, at one time) what happened n times (e.g. “I went to bed early every day of the week”).

    2. Mood. Whereas tense (i.e. order, duration, and frequency) describes narrative temporality, mood describes the “regulation of narrative information,”33 such as how much or how little is told (distance) and through what channel (perspective). Distance involves the words and thoughts of a character, while perspective or point of view describes who sees in the narrative and his or her capacities of knowledge. Perspective varies greatly, as a story can be told from the point of view of (focalized through) or about (focalized on) a specific character. In the television series Sex and the City, for instance, the story is told from the perspective of Carrie Bradshaw, who frequently shares her personal thoughts. Consequently, viewers are invited to identify with Carrie and to see the world through her eyes.
    3. Voice. Genette’s final category, voice, entails the position, type, and relation of the narrator. Questions of voice include: Is the narrator a character in the story (homodiegetic) or is she or he outside the story‐world (heterodiegetic)? What is the narrator’s degree of omniscience? Is the narrator reliable? Is the story told in first or third person? Genette regarded the distinction between voice and mood to be an important one because narrative voice frames how audiences understand and relate to narrative mood. While a character in a story may have a particularly optimistic outlook about the future (mood), the audience may know that such optimism is unwarranted because the character is about to experience bad fortune (voice). This is precisely the situation in horror films when the audience is shown (afforded special knowledge by the narrator) that there is a killer hiding under the bed on which a character is unwittingly having sex. Having more knowledge than the character in this case heightens the audience’s fear by creating the expectation of violence.

As is likely evident by this point, narratives are complex rhetorical structures involving many variables. Thus, we have included Figure 5.6 to clarify how those variables relate to one another.

No alt text required.

Figure 5.6 The elements of narrative.

The Material Turn: Affect and Aesthetics

Up to this point, our discussion of a Rhetorical approach to media has focused on how signs or texts – sets of signs working together – create meaning and influence audiences. We have, in keeping with a rather traditional Rhetorical perspective, concentrated on how media appeal to or move us at a purely symbolic, cognitive level. But, more recently, Rhetorical scholars have begun to ask how rhetoric moves us at a material, bodily level. Music scholars, for instance, are quick to point out that the melody, harmony, and rhythm of a song do not function in the same manner as the words in a book, for they do not represent (i.e. stand in for) something else.34 Yet, these nonsymbolic elements of music clearly exert a powerful influence upon us. Our bodies literally feel and experience the rhythm of a song, which may, in turn, prompt us to tap our feet. Similarly, the timbre or grain (the material message) of someone’s voice can – independent of what that person is saying (the symbolic message) – sway us, depending upon whether it is pleasing or displeasing. Thus, as Rhetorical scholars continue to investigate how messages move audiences, they are increasingly attending to media’s materiality as well as its symbolicity.

The historical bias in favor of symbolicity, over and at the expense of materiality, is a consequence of two closely related but mistaken philosophical assumptions: (1) that the mind and body are separate, independent structures, and (2) that meaning belongs primarily to the purview of the former. Today, most scholars reject the mind/body dualism that originated with the French philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century. Critiquing Descartes’ view, philosopher Mark Johnson explains:

A person is not a mind and a body. There are not two “things” somehow mysteriously yoked together. What we call a “person” is a certain kind of bodily organism that has a brain operating within its body, a body that is continually interacting with aspects of its environments (material and social) in an ever‐changing process of experience … In short, “mind” and “body” are merely abstracted aspects of the flow of organism–environment interactions that constitutes what we call experience.35

In addition to rejecting the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy, scholars increasingly understand that “Meaning is grounded in our bodily experiences,”36 and that one must study our visceral and corporeal connections to the world in order to apprehend human meaning‐making.

How, then, does one critically assess bodily experiences? As bodies interact with their material surroundings, they experience various energies, intensities, pulsations, and rhythms, which through sensory data (sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactility) generate affect. The term “affect” is often used in a generic sense to refer to emotion, but, as Brian Massumi and others have noted, affect and emotion are not precisely the same thing. Affect describes an intensity registered directly by the body and, therefore, operates on a nonrepresentional or asignifying register.37 Emotion, by contrast, is conscious and qualified and, thus, carries a particular valence and meaning. Admittedly, an affect such as a tingling of the skin on watching a horror film is often quickly qualified into a recognizable emotion, such as fear. To complicate matters further, feelings and moods are states that fall somewhere between affect and emotion, and, indeed, many media scholars use “affect,” “feeling,” “mood,” and “emotion” interchangeably. So, why bother with these distinctions?

Rhetorical scholars have a well‐developed vocabulary and set of critical tools (such as sign, text, cluster, form, genre, and narrative) for analyzing how media operate symbolically, but they lack a detailed vocabulary and sophisticated set of tools for understanding media’s fundamental materiality. The distinction between affect and emotion reflects a desire on the part of Rhetorical critics to take seriously the way media move audiences materially. Viewing affect as “primary, non‐conscious … asignifying, unqualified, and intensive”38 affords critics a tool for studying how matter, which makes up all music, film, television, and so on, appeals directly to the human sensorium. Recognizing that matter produces sensation and, hence, affect is an important first step in understanding the materiality of media. But it does not yet explain why specific arrangements of matter such as a film or a song may elicit public or shared affect. To address this issue, we must consider the notion of the aesthetic.

Just as the signs that make up media are organized into signifying or textual structures such as form and narrative, so the matter that makes up media possesses sensual or aesthetic properties such as “consonance, dissonance, harmonies of tone, light, colour, sound and rhythm.”39 The aesthetic, as we are using it here, refers to those qualities of an artwork that, while asignifying, generate sensual experiences and evoke affective responses from audiences. Unlike textual structures, the aesthetic properties of media do not function to symbolize. As we have already seen, the rhythm of a song does not refer to something outside of itself and, therefore, does not convey a specific meaning. While the aesthetic is not, properly speaking, symbolic, it is, as Debra Hawhee observes, “always and everywhere rhetorical – that is, productive of effects – and crucially, these effects are produced on and through the live and lively bodies in audiences.”40 We might say, then, that the aesthetic produces presence effects – effects that prime our bodies, essentially predisposing us to experience an event and its attendant symbols in a particular way. In a moment, we will consider a few specific ways that the aesthetic induces affective priming, but first we summarize the differences between rhetoric’s symbolicity and materiality in Table 5.2.

Though media aesthetics is frequently ignored by Rhetorical scholars because it is seen as involving purely subjective judgments and tastes,41 it is vital to the way media texts function materially. As Arthur Asa Berger explains with regard to film, “The way a scene is shot – the cutting, the editing, the use of music and sound effects, the lighting, the camera work – conveys a great deal of information and gives a sense of the importance of what we are seeing relative to other images and events in the text.”42 It is useful, therefore, to highlight a few important aspects of media aesthetics. In several of the supporting quotations throughout this section, the word “emotional” is used in place of the word “affective,” though the latter term is probably more correct.

Table 5.2 Comparison of rhetoric’s symbolic and material dimensions

Symbolicity Materiality
Basis Symbol or sign Matter or substance
Mechanism Signifying structures Aesthetic properties
Activates Cognition Sensation
Type of effect Meaning Presence
Induces Attitudes Affects
  1. Color. Though color can be symbolic, such as the use of red to mean hot and blue to mean cold, color also has an immediate “emotional quality, which derives partly from personal associations; partly from experience in nature.”43 The ability of color to impact our mood and feelings is well established in both psychological and media scholarship.44 Indeed, with regard to film, Barbara Kennedy argues that “Colour functions as the main modulator of sensation.”45 So, for instance, while red stimulates excitement, blue and pink have a calming effect.46
  2. Lighting. Like color, light (or its absence) has a strong symbolic dimension. While light typically signifies good, virtue, and salvation, darkness signifies evil, sin, and doom.47 But light also operates on a material level and “can have profound effects on emotional states.”48 The intensity, focus, and shape of light can be used to guide or direct attention, to create depth and perspective, and to establish or enhance a particular mood. Since darkness can induce fear, horror films use dimly lit images to reinforce feelings of dread and fright. Meanwhile, films such as Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and television series such as Netflix’s House of Cards employ darkness to create a general sense of malaise.
  3. Editing. Editing describes the sequencing and length of individual shots within film and television, as well as the type (cuts, fades, dissolves, wipes, etc.) and frequency of transitions or shifts between shots. The way moving images are edited can have a profound influence on how an audience feels during a scene. Berger notes, for instance, that “Quick cutting between shots creates a sense of excitement in viewers; they work in a way opposite to that of lingering shots, which slow things down.”49 Identifiable editing practices often emerge in relation to specific media forms, and thus influence the way audiences respond to those forms. So, unlike in Hollywood’s classical narratives, whose editing functions to locate one in time and space, music videos rely on montage, a rapid editing style more likely to generate a sensation of discontinuity.50
  4. Movement and framing. Camera movement (i.e. panning, dollying, and tracking) and framing techniques (e.g. angle of elevation) can powerfully shape the way audiences feel about a person or event. As Ann Marie Seward Barry observes:

    The language of camera angles is … highly manipulative emotionally … If the angle is extreme, the attitude becomes emphatic. Low angles (shot from beneath with the camera looking up at a subject) give the subject a sense of importance, power, and respect … In contrast, when a film is shot from a high place looking down on the figure (that is, high angle), the reverse effect is achieved, and the figure looks small, helpless, and insignificant.51

    Camera angles are only one of the many techniques involved in image framing. The critic who wishes to understand the emotional valence created by the camera will need to attend to viewpoint, field of view, and picture composition, as well.

  5. Sound. In media such as television and film, sound is omnipresent; while noises (i.e. sound effects) such as a ringing phone or car engine generate a sense of verisimilitude by actualizing time and space, music plays a central role in establishing mood.52 In a study of the mode, texture, and tempo of music, for instance, Gregory Webster and Catherine Weir found that major keys, non‐harmonized melodies, and faster tempos were more likely to result in happier responses, while minor keys, harmonized melodies, and slower tempos were more likely to evoke sadness.53 Similarly, Kevin Donnelly has demonstrated how the ephemeral character of film music manipulates audiences’ emotions.54

The five aspects of media aesthetics discussed here do not constitute a comprehensive list, especially since different media have different aesthetics. When evaluating painting, posters, or photography, for instance, a critic would want to consider balance, shape, and form in place of editing, camera movement, and sound. The study of stationary images and other visual artifacts such as public memorials, buildings, and fashion has become so popular in recent years that it has produced its own rich body of literature, known as visual rhetoric.55 In many ways, the scholarship on specifically visual rhetorics, which typically excludes moving images such as film, video, and television56 in addition to music, mirrors the basic trajectory of the Rhetorical study of media generally. It began with an almost exclusive focus on the symbolic dimensions of visuality (a bias that is still widely evident), but has slowly begun to recognize the importance of visual imagery’s fully embodied, material dimensions. As the Rhetorical approach to the study of media continues to develop, it will need to more fully theorize and appraise the relation between the symbolic and the material.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have considered what it means to approach media from a Rhetorical perspective by discussing what signs are, how they create meaning, how they combine to form texts, and how texts are structured to appeal to audiences. In the final section, we considered the affective dimensions of aesthetic experience, of how media move us materially and sway us somatically, and contribute to human meaning‐making as a fully embodied experience. The Rhetorical approach, as we have described it thus far, reflects a rather structuralist perspective. Structuralism is the idea, largely popularized by the anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss, that each element in a cultural system derives its meaning in relation to other elements in that system;57 moreover, it tends to regard such systems (language, food, fashion, kinship, etc.) as relatively closed and independent. This latter assumption has come under some critique from poststructuralists, who tend to view systems as interlocking and structures themselves as more open.

We wish to be careful of drawing too sharp a distinction between structuralism and poststructuralism, however, as most theorists agree that the seeds of poststructuralism are already present in structuralism. Perhaps the most important distinction is in how they conceptualize “texts.” In structuralism, the meaning of a text derives from “internal” or immanent structures. The producer and receiver of a text (and, to some extent, even other texts) are seen as having very little to do with the text’s meaning. Poststructuralism, by contrast, sees meaning as a complex interaction among texts (intertextuality), as well as between audiences and texts. The practical consequence of this distinction is that structuralism treats texts as more closed (possessing singular meanings) and poststructuralism treats texts as more open (inviting multiple meanings). The implications of this shift in perspective are more fully explored in Chapter 10 on Reception theory, which considers the centrality of audiences in meaning‐making.

SUGGESTED READING

  1. Barthes, R. Elements of Semiology, trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.
  2. Barthes, R. Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.
  3. Bordwell, D. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
  4. Brummett, B. Rhetoric in Popular Culture, 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006.
  5. Burke, K. Counter‐Statement. Los Altos, CA: Hermes, 1931.
  6. Burke, K. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1941.
  7. Campbell, K.K. and Jamieson, K.H. Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action. Falls Church, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1976.
  8. Chandler, D. Semiotics: The Basics. New York: Routledge, 2002.
  9. Chatman, S. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.
  10. Culler, J. Ferdinand de Saussure, revised edn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.
  11. Deming, C. Hill Street Blues as Narrative. In Critical Perspectives on Media and Society, R. Avery and D. Eason (eds.), pp. 240–64. New York: Guilford, 1991.
  12. de Saussure, F. Course in General Linguistics, trans. R. Harris. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1986.
  13. Feuer, J. Genre Study and Television. In Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, R.C. Allen (ed.), pp. 138–60. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
  14. Fry, N. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.
  15. Genette, G. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. J.E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.
  16. Hoopes, J. (ed.) Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics by Charles Sanders Peirce. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
  17. Johnson, M. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics and Human Understanding. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
  18. Kennedy, B.M. Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
  19. Kozloff, S. Narrative Theory and Television. In Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, R.C. Allen (ed.), pp. 67–100. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
  20. Massumi, B. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
  21. Metz, C. Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
  22. Olson, L.C., Finnegan, C.A., and Hope, D.S. (eds.) Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Contemporary Communication and American Culture. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2008.
  23. Ott, B.L. The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema. Critical Studies in Media Communication 2010, 27(1), 39–54.
  24. Scholes, R., Phelan, J., and Kellogg, R. The Nature of Narrative, 40th anniversary edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  25. Seiter, E. Semiotics, Structuralism, and Television. In Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, R.C. Allen (ed.), pp. 31–66. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

NOTES

  1. 1 See B.L. Ott, The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema, Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, 2010, 39–54.
  2. 2 The claim that all media are rhetorical should not be taken to mean that media are nothing but rhetorical. On this distinction, see M.J. Medhurst and T.W. Benson, Rhetorical Dimensions in Media: A Critical Casebook, 2nd edn (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1991), xix.
  3. 3 Aristotle, On Rhetoric, trans. G.A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 14.
  4. 4 This is a paraphrase of Burke’s definition: “The use of symbols to induce action in beings that normally communicate by symbols” [ K. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1950), 162 ].
  5. 5 “[S]peech in its essence is not neutral. Far from suspended judgment, the … speech of people is loaded with judgments. It is intensely moral – its names for objects contain the emotional overtones which give us cues as to how we should act toward these objects. Even a word like ‘automobile’ will usually contain a concealed choice (it designates not merely an object, but a desirable object). Spontaneous speech is not a naming at all, but a system of attitudes, of implicit exortations … speech is profoundly partisan” [ K. Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, revised edn. (Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1954), 176–7 ].
  6. 6 K. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), 45.
  7. 7 The authors of this book reject the idea that invitational rhetoric, which is believed by a small group of scholars to be an alternative to persuasive discourse, is somehow not suasory. Continuing to promote invitational rhetoric as such dangerously obfuscates the ways in which it, like any other form of discourse, necessarily entails and promotes particular biases.
  8. 8 J. Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 15.
  9. 9 F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. R. Harris (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1986), 15.
  10. 10 Saussure, 67.
  11. 11 Culler, 33.
  12. 12 Saussure, 70.
  13. 13 Quoted in D.S. Clarke, Jr., Sources of Semiotic: Readings with Commentary from Antiquity to the Present (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 58.
  14. 14 Quoted in Clarke, 59.
  15. 15 Quoted in Clarke, 71.
  16. 16 Quoted in Clarke, 74.
  17. 17 M. Ribière, Barthes: A Beginner’s Guide (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002), 1.
  18. 18 R. Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 89.
  19. 19 One can never, as Barthes would say, arrive at a final signified.
  20. 20 Barthes, Elements, 50.
  21. 21 R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 40.
  22. 22 B. Brummett, Rhetoric in Popular Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006), 34.
  23. 23 K. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Baton Rouge, LA; Louisiana State University Press, 1941), 20.
  24. 24 K. Burke, Counter‐Statement (Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1931), 124.
  25. 25 Burke, Counter‐Statement, 124.
  26. 26 Burke, Counter‐Statement, 125.
  27. 27 C.R. Miller, Genre as Social Action, Quarterly Journal of Speech 1984, 70, 152.
  28. 28 T. Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre, trans. R. Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 14.
  29. 29 J. Feuer, Genre Study and Television, in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, R.C. Allen (ed.), pp. 138–60 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 140.
  30. 30 V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd edn. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1968).
  31. 31 A.J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
  32. 32 S. Kozloff, Narrative Theory and Television, in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, R.C. Allen (ed.), pp. 67–100 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
  33. 33 G. Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. J.E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 162.
  34. 34 M. Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics and Human Understanding (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 238.
  35. 35 Johnson, 11–12.
  36. 36 Johnson, 12.
  37. 37 B. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 25–8.
  38. 38 S. Shaviro, Post‐Cinematic Affect (Washington: 0‐Books, 2010), 3.
  39. 39 B.M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 114.
  40. 40 D. Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 13.
  41. 41 This bias against aesthetic experience is largely inherited from Immanuel Kant. See Johnson, 211–18.
  42. 42 A.A. Berger, Essentials of Mass Communication Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 81.
  43. 43 A.M.S. Barry, Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 130.
  44. 44 In psychology, see M. Hemphill, A Note on Adult’s Color‐Emotion Associations, Journal of Genetic Psychology 1996, 157, 275–80, and K.W. Jacobs and J.F. Suess, Effects of Four Psychological Primary Colours on Anxiety State, Perceptual and Motor Skills 1975, 41, 207–10. In media studies, see B.H. Detenber, R.F. Simons, and J.E. Reiss, The Emotional Significance of Color in Television Presentations, Media Psychology 2000, 2, 331–55; M.‐C. Lichtlé, The Effect of an Advertisement’s Colour on Emotions Evoked by an Ad and Attitude Towards the Ad, International Journal of Advertising 2007, 26, 37–62; and P. Valdez and A. Mehrabian, Effects of Color on Emotions, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 1994, 42, 113–27.
  45. 45 Kennedy, 115.
  46. 46 R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, New Version (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 368; see also Barry, 132.
  47. 47 Arnheim, 324.
  48. 48 Barry, 134.
  49. 49 Berger, 83.
  50. 50 C. Vernallis, Experiencing the Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 37.
  51. 51 Barry, 135–6.
  52. 52 J. Monaco, How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History, and Theory of Film and Media, revised edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 179.
  53. 53 G.D. Webster and C.G. Weir, Emotional Responses to Music: Interactive Effects of Mode, Texture, and Tempo, Motivation and Emotion 2005, 29, 19–39.
  54. 54 K. Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television (London: British Film Institute, 2005).
  55. 55 For an overview of this literature, see B.L. Ott and G. Dickinson, Visual Rhetoric as/and Critical Pedagogy, in The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, A. Lunsford (ed.), pp. 391–405 (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2009).
  56. 56 Visual rhetoric scholars are beginning to consider media that include moving images, but historically the focus has been on stationary imagery and artifacts.
  57. 57 C. Lévi‐Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. Grundfest Schopf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 33.
..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset