Visual Rhetoric

This literature review traces recent scholarship on a particular form of communication that uses images for persuasive purposes: visual rhetoric. Disciplines within the purview of this literature review include writing studies, speech, communication, education, and marketing as well as, to a limited degree, anthropology, information science, art history, architecture, and design. The chapter will discuss three main theoretical constructs which ground scholarship in this field: rhetoric, iconology, and semiotics. The chapter will then explore how the Sister Arts tradition has been evoked as a potential model for interdisciplinary scholarly work; describe the propensity for social justice in writing studies pedagogy; identify convergence and divergence in scholarship on visual rhetoric that hold promise for new avenues of interdisciplinary research; and introduce scholarship in education and information science that sheds new light on the topic.