ENGL 378 | Visual Rhetoric

This course investigates how texts might generate and require a literacy that is visual before it is lexical. By tracing the relationship between words and images in a variety of genres including illustrated novels, photographic essays, comic books, film, and zines, students explore how images convey, argue, and narrate cultural, political, and personal stories. In addition to these primary texts, readings include seminal essays in semiotics and cultural studies that enable students to examine the distinctions between visual literacy and print literacy, the relationship between word and image, and what it means to be visually literate.