ABSTRACT
As the chapters in this volume so well demonstrate, attempting to define visual rhetoric is slippery business. Highly contestable, the term visual rhetoric is invoked to describe a broad range of diverse scholarly interests. These include, for example, “narrowly, the study of the design of texts on pages,” to “more generally, the study of all visual signs, including the semiotics of graphic arts, television, and other media” (Bernhardt 746), to a broader study of “visual and material practices, from architecture to cartography, and from interior design to public memorials” (Lucaites and Hariman 37). Yet, however disparate and decidedly contested definitions of visual rhetoric are, they nevertheless share a tendency to draw a hard-line distinction between rhetoric of the word and rhetoric of the image, that is, a dichotomy between the visual and the verbal features of textualized objects. In this chapter, I argue that the relationship between rhetoric of the word and rhetoric of the image is far more fluid both on synchronic and diachronic levels than the divide permits. This relationship is contingent on social, cultural, economic and technological domains in which existing semiotic resources for both creating/transforming and circulating/consuming meanings shift along axes of accessibility, purposes, subject positions, material conditions and practices.
