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Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media

by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick, Eds.
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003
376 pp., 51 illus. b/w. Trade, $39.95
ISBN: 0-262-08317-5.

Reviewed by Dene Grigar
Texas Woman’s University

dgrigar@twu.edu

There is much to admire in Mary Hocks and Michelle Kendrick’s Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, enough, in fact, to recommend it as a text for graduate courses and for use in scholarship. For one, the book looks at visual rhetoric from the perspective of many different fields, from Rhetoric to New Media to Humanities Computing to Cognitive Studies. Most of the essays are insightful and thoughtfully written. The issues raised surrounding visual rhetoric are topical and reveal points of contention among scholars and practitioners about what it is, how it functions in relation to verbal rhetoric, and how best to talk about and teach it.

The stated focus of the book is to explore "the current status of the ‘eloquent image’ by examining rhetorical and cultural uses of word and image, both historically and currently" (1); its essays, to mix "theory, critique, and practice to present the assumptions of an interdisciplinary array of artists, critics, and designers about the complex and often contradictory relations of word and image" (2). The authors also provide "critiques not only the dichotomous thinking that renders image as feminine and the word as masculine but also "descriptions" of hypertext and hypermedia that "reduce" them to "purely formal kind of poetics and aesthetics" or "one kind of theory" or "any theory of communication isolated from production and rhetorical contexts" (2). A tall order, indeed, and the reason some scholars may not find the book, in its entirety, useful––the topics are so broad, and its voices are so frequently dissonant.

Two strong chapters lead off the first section, "Visual and Verbal Practices in New Media." First, Jay David Bolter looks at the way academe has responded to new media and provides a narrative about the way his department has come to understand it. His claim that media critics "are committing themselves to a particular perspective, in which the word is the privileged mode of representation and images are secondary and subsidiary" (24) overlooks, however, N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines, which, balancing images and words, upturns such stereotypes about Humanities-based scholarship. The second, Anne Wysocki’s essay, "Seriously Visible," successfully critiques what can only be called Urban-Myths-About-Hypertext: "that hypertextual documents are by their very structure supposed to encourage readers into more active and engaged relationships with texts and thus with each other," and 2) documents that "give more weight to their visual rather than their verbal components ought not to be taken seriously or ought to be relegated to children an the illiterate" (37). Hers is the liveliest writing in the volume.

Part 2 at "Historical Relationships between Word and Image" offers an insightful piece by Kevin LaGrandeur about how ancient rhetoricians, Aristotle, Gorgias, and Horace, can help us "think about, to analyze the rhetorical dimensions of . . . images" (117) while Matthew Kirschenbaum’s "The Word as Image in an Age of Digital Reproduction" interrogates Stuart Moulthrop’s claim that "’the word is an image after all’"(137), from a rather limited perspective––he argues from the premise that the qualities of text that Humanities Computing scholars value and understand are the qualities that must be found in images and should be valued and understood by all other scholars (149). The argument works this way: Images are not texts because they do not behave as texts do for Humanities Computing experts.

Essays in Part III, "Perception and Knowledge in Visual and Verbal Texts" explore visual rhetoric from the perspective of cognitive studies. The most satisfying comment, perhaps in the book, is made here by Nancy Barta-Smith and Danette DiMarco in "Same Difference: Evolving Conclusions about Textuality and Media." In challenging claims about "shift from print to visual ‘writing’ with the advent of new media capabilities" (159), they say that "we may find that the most revolutionary ideas about writing and new media emerge as mixtures of existing text, voice, and image, that is as evolving combinations rather than definitive conclusions about textuality and new media" (175). At that moment, theirs are the voices of clarity.

The final section, "Identities and Cultures in Digital Design," include essays relating to feminist and cultural studies and VR. Of these, Gail Hawisher and Patricia Sullivan’s and Ellen Strain and Gregory VanHoosier-Carey’s articles are the most useful to scholars.

In all, the book’s polyvocal, complex approach to visual rhetoric makes for a good text to follow or surplant those like Nicholas Mirzoeff’s An Introduction to Visual Culture and will animate a few scholars into energetic discussions about images and words, eloquent or not.

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Updated 1st January 2004


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