The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

In a work with far-reaching implications, Chela Sandoval does no less than revise the genealogy of theory over the past thirty years, inserting what she terms "U.S. Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity.What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed". This methodology -- born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange -- holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics. Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression.

Methodology of the oppressed

This paper considers the role of design, as the emergent arrangement of concrete details that embodies a new idea, in mediating between innovations and established institutional fields as entrepren...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3094872.pdf

When Innovations Meet Institutions: Edison and the Design of the Electric Light:

In this article, past consumer research dealing with advertising images is analyzed and critiqued for its underlying assumption: that pictures are reflections of reality. The case against this assumption is presented, and an alternative view, in which visuals are a convention-based symbolic system, is formulated. In this alternative view, pictures must be cognitively processed, rather than absorbed peripherally or automatically. The author argues that current conceptualizations of advertising images are incommensurate with what ads are really like, and that many images currently dismissed as affect laden or information devoid are, in fact, complex figurative arguments. A new theoretical framework for the study of images is advanced in which advertising images are a sophisticated form of visual rhetoric. The process of consumer response implied by the new framework differs radically from past concepts in many ways, but also suggests new ways to approach questions currently open in the literature on the nature and processing of imagery. A pluralistic program for studying advertising pictures as persuasion is outlined.

Images in Advertising: The Need for a Theory of Visual Rhetoric

Text interpretations, two experiments, and a set of reader-response interviews examine the impact of stylistic elements in advertising that form visual rhetorical figures parallel to those found in language The visual figures examined here— rhyme, antithesis, metaphor, and pun—produced more elaboration and led to a more favorable attitude toward the ad, without being any more difficult to comprehend Interviews confirmed that several of the meanings generated by informants corresponded to those produced by an a priori text-interpretive analysis of the ads However, all of these effects diminished or disappeared for the visual tropes (metaphor and pun) in the case of individuals who lacked the cultural competency required to adequately appreciate the contemporary American ads on which the studies are based Results are discussed in terms of the power of rhetorical theory and cultural competency theory (Scott 1994a) for illuminating the role played by visual elements in advertising Overall, the project demonstrates the advantages of investigating visual persuasion via an integration of multiple research traditions

/pdf/visual-rhetoric-in-advertising-text-interpretive-18ybbnm1hh.pdf

Johannes A. Gaertner

Papers

Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation