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Communication and Dramaturgy:
20th-Century Visual Politics

36R:405 Gronbeck, Spring 2004

Schedule

This is a proseminar in a special sub-topic of what I consider the dramaturgical (performative) tradition of communication studies: the coming of certain dominant modes for doing politics especially in 20th-century United States. Those modes for doing politics are understood to be a culmination of a visualist social epistemology that has been a part of Western cultures since the pre-Socratic philosophers, that was theorized epistemologically with the coming of modernist thought (Descartes being a central figure), and that blossomed especially with the coming of photographic-electronic means of collective or mass communication. These are large, even controversial, claims that have historical, philosophical (especially epistemological and ethical), and certainly sociocultural implications for how we are to understand the human condition from within a political perspective. There will no attempt to exhaust any of these topics, but, rather, in keeping with my usual pedagogy for proseminars, only an effort to expose students to a variety of political messages and events that can be analyzed visually: that is, messages whose meaning-making apparatuses include significant visual coding and whose effectivity cannot be understood reasonably without recourse to questions of visualist epistemologies and political pragmatics.

In keeping with my understanding of proseminars, the course will involve significant student effort in the learning process. Group work teams will be built around the various communication media that we will examine, with each group being in charge of in-class presentations. I will work with the groups, supplying bibliography, possible samples of political discourses for class analysis and presentation, and, of course, good advice.

But, there also will be a final paper to be written--each student's own study of visual politics. Given the national conference on visual rhetorics to be run by Iowa and Indiana in September 2001, the opportunities for public presentation of projects are imminent.

Workload: three group presentations, one final paper. (Anyone wanting a fourth credit also may do an annotated bibliography of readings.)

Textbook: Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Culture, Media and Identities series (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997).

Reading: Sontag, Susan. "Looking at War: Photography's View of Devastation and Death." The New Yorker, December 9, 2002.

Instructor: Bruce Gronbeck.

Offices: 149 BCSB (5-0580, with messages at 828-4033); 105 Brewery Square (5-2753, with messages read there on Wednesday mornings); N118E Oakdale Hall (Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, with messages taken at 5-4034).

Office Hours: M, 10:30-11:30, 2:30-3:30; T, 10:00-10:45; W, 11:00-12:00 (BSQ); Th, 10:00-10:45. Others available by appointment. I'm accessed also at bruce-gronbeck@uiowa.edu.

Plagiarism, Disabilities, Complaints: Using the language or ideas without acknowledgement is an academic sin, a punishable offence. Ask if you don't know what it is. If you have physical or psychological disabilities, I'll do what I can to accommodate you; help also is available through the Office of Student Disabilities in Burge Hall. You're allowed to complain about course content, my attitudes and outlooks, grading, sexual harrassment, a perceived lack of academic freedom, or even other students' actions in the classroom. UI procedures require that you start complaints with me, then move to the DEO if you wish, and then on through extra-departmental procedures as described in the Code of Student Life. Complaints will not be held against you.