Kevin DeLuca
Rheotoric, like a number of disciplines, is being pulled into the force-field exerted by images at this present historical juncture, what Mitchell terms "the pictorial turn" (1995, p. 11). The issue now is not so much "Will rhetoric take into account images?" but "How will rhetoric take into account images?" Some early indicators have been less than heartening as rhetoricians either use familiar tools to treat images as if they were words or acknowledge the images but then proceed with all due haste to an analysis of accompanying words (Aden, 1994; Olson and Goodnight, 1994; Hogan, 1994), for images are always already in the company of words and embedded in cultural traditions heavily dependent on orality and print. Another tack is to open rhetoric to images to see what that tells us about images and rhetoric. A number of scholars at this conference are already performing this work and in this essay I hope to contribute to that effort. Through an analysis of a rather conventional piece of rhetorical criticism and then by offering an overview of the role of pictures in environmental politics, my intention is to displace that stubborn mainstay, intentionality, and offer possible alternatives for thinking about rhetoric and images
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