Understanding Visual Arguments

Описание: Presented by Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer on October 16, 2014 as part of the Speaking About Pedagogy and Practice in English webinar series.

Can there be an argument without words? Scholars of argument do not believe that everything is an argument, but they do agree that arguments can be mounted through images. But how, exactly? How can there be an argument without words when we are accustomed to reading arguments that consist of a clearly articulated claim that is supported by because-clauses? And how can readers be confident that they are taking in the argument mounted by a specific image? This webinar is designed to address the many issues that are associated with making and understanding visual arguments and to assist teachers who want to help their students to understand and them.

Lester Faigley holds the Robert Adger Law and Thos. H. Law Professorship in Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He was the founding director of the Division (now Department) of Rhetoric and Writing at Texas in 1993, and he served as the 1996 Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Faigley has published over forty books and editions, including Fragments of Rationality (Pittsburgh, 1992), which received the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize.

Jack Selzer has taught a variety of composition and technical communication courses at Penn State since 1978, and he has collaborated with colleagues at Penn State and elsewhere in all kinds of way. With Lester Faigley, he has written Good Reasons and Good Reasons with Contemporary Arguments, now in their sixth editions, and he also has edited a number of versions of Conversations: Readings for Writing (now edited by Dominic Delli Carpini). Past President of the Rhetoric Society of America, previously president of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, and currently Paterno Family Liberal Arts Professor, he has published or edited a number articles and books, including Rhetorical Bodies (with Sharon Crowley), Kenneth Burke in the 1930s (with Ann George), and Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village. He currently enjoys teaching a first-year seminar on the rhetoric of the civil rights movement—and happens to be a charter member of the longest continuously running fantasy sports league on the face of the earth.