Blog #1 Verbal & Visual Literacy

Hobbs, Catherine L. "Learning from the Past: Verbal and Visual Literacy in Early Modern Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogy." Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. 55-70. Print.

In this article, Catherine Hobb’s argues that the visual is and always has been directly connected to the verbal. That said, it is necessary to continue to both teach and study visual literacy.  By tracing the evolution of the visual in rhetorical studies and teaching, she inexorably ties the study of rhetoric and literacy to the visual-we have an incomplete study of rhetoric if we only continue to study and teach the verbal. The connection is made between the visual and several areas of both theoretical study, teaching, and practical use: the creation of ethos through the visual, the visual as a basis for the judicial system, the rhetorical topics of “time and place” reflected in the visual, the art of memory, the creation or gain of knowledge through observation, language origination and the visual, the ambiguity of vision (therefore the need for interpretation). The article is separated into four distinct era’s of rhetoric/study (“Ancient Arts,” “Medieval and Renaissance Images,” “Ocularism in the Enlightenment” and “Description in Modernity”) and pulling from what the primary rhetoricians, philosophers and teachers (Aristotle, Plato, Bacon, Newton, Locke, Gassendi, Blair, etc.) of that era said and did in regard to the visual. The final section of the article examines the relationship between the visual and the verbal by explaining both the differences and how they translate to each other. Today, it’s something we can no longer let sit on the back burner as the two have come together in the form of “new media.” We cannot/should not separate the visual from the verbal, nor we privilege one over the other.

This article is useful in the sense that understanding the way a specific concept has been treated throughout history is useful. She takes an approach in her article that is similar to the one taken in this class-trace the idea through the major figures that studied in. Many times, we see authors use history to shy away from change: it’s always been done this way, etc. However, this author is able to use the history of the visual/verbal in order to call attention to the issue of visual literacy that is under debate today. I think she has a good point. We have, as a discipline, focused very heavily on the attendance to the verbal, and assuming that the visual is self-explanatory or concrete. This is particularly helpful to those who plan to study “new media” because new media involves the melding of the image, the verbal and the text.