Non-Discursive Rhetoric: Image and Affect in Multimodal Composition
Joddy Murray
Language: English
Pages: 244
ISBN: 0791476766
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Examines the role of image and affect in teaching with new digital technologies and multimedia composition.
Technological advances have the potential to create new languages unlike printed or spoken words. The increased textual complexity generated by sophisticated graphics, photos, hypermedia, film, typography, and other modes of expression requires a theory of language and symbolization that accommodates emotion, ambiguity, simultaneity, and layers of dynamic meaning. In Non-discursive Rhetoric, Joddy Murray uses concepts from philosophy, rhetorical theory, and recent advances in neuroscience to develop a model of composing that connects contemporary writing practices, technology, and image functions within the mind. The theory and classroom practices presented here provide tools for writing teachers to help students compose various hybridized, multimodal texts. Murray highlights the significance for student composition of the relationships among emotions, images, and argumentation, and demonstrates the importance of considering the rhetorical dimensions of design choices in multimodal composition.
the “all-to-be-revealed” culture very often communicated through the visual realm (1). He identifies four types of mediated voyeurism and he elaborates on the politics of voyeurism (or, more accurately, he elaborates on politics as voyeurism, citing examples ranging from Clinton White House scandals to other episodes captured by the paparazzi-type journalism around many political officials). The book spells out the cultural backlash such voyeurism evokes, making “real lives” into “real
“mother” must be there if we are to be convinced she is indeed my “mother”: though she looks, sounds, smells, and even acts like mother, she cannot be mother unless the emotional shadings related to these images are also available to the brain for processing. Our writing theories should therefore account for this intimate connection between emotions and image. Because of the intimate connection between image and thought, and because images themselves operate primarily as non-discursive text, then
consciousness and extended consciousness. He defines the former as having a single “level of organization” which is stable throughout life and which is not exclusively a human phenomenon (16). Core consciousness provides a sense of self, a sense of “here and now,” yet it does not provide a sense of the future or the distant past. It is akin to the “old brain core” (hypothalamus, brain stem, and the limbic system) that “handles basic biological regulation” (Descartes’ 129). Damasio’s extended
the power of development and organization, the strength of concretization, the meaning-making power of unity and coherence. These values work to create non-discursive text that may or may not be explicated and converted into discursive text. The primary motive here is not exposition or even meaning-making; rather, the primary motive of this theory is disposition, the making of what is within a world of becoming. If there is an actual textual product, then there is no need for that product to do
forces in language: the force inherent in language which works to create ambivalence and confusion as it emanates, propagates, and dissipates into connotations and ambiguities. Will-to-Integrate Finally, the will-to-integrate is that feature of non-discursive symbolization that allows for the making of connections and the synthesis of what the text is and what we intend. Integration is a key feature of human consciousness. The reentry systems, or parallel pathways, which connect every portion of