Definition:
A branch of rhetorical studies concerned with the persuasive use of images, whether on their own or in the company of words. See also: visual metaphor.
Examples and Observations:
- "[W]ords and how they're gathered on a page have a visual aspect of their own, but they may also interact with nondiscursive images such as drawings, paintings, photographs, or moving pictures. Most advertisements, for instance, use some combination of text and visuals to promote a product for service. . . . While visual rhetoric is not entirely new, the subject of visual rhetoric is becoming increasingly important, especially since we are constantly inundated with images and also since images can serve as rhetorical proofs."
(Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. Pearson, 2004) - "Not every visual object is visual rhetoric. What turns a visual object into a communicative artifact--a symbol that communicates and can be studied as rhetoric--is the presence of three characteristics. . . . The image must be symbolic, involve human intervention, and be presented to an audience for the purpose of communicating with that audience."
(Kenneth Louis Smith, Handbook of Visual Communication. Routledge, 2005) - "[T]he grocery store--banal as it may be--is a crucial place for understanding everyday, visual rhetoric in a postmodern world."
(Greg Dickinson, "Placing Visual Rhetoric," in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite H. Helmers. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004) - "[A]dvertising constitutes a dominant genre of visual rhetoric . . .. Like verbal rhetoric, visual rhetoric depends on strategies of identification; advertising's rhetoric is dominated by appeals to gender as the primary marker of consumer identity."
(Diane Hope, "Gendered Environments," in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. by C. A. Hill and M. H. Helmers, 2004)
