Emily Kaplan
ABSTRACTS

Brooks, Kevin. "More "Seriously Visible" Reading: McCloud, McLuhan, and the Visual Language of The Medium Is the Message." College Composition and Communication 61.1 (2009). Conference on College Composition and Communication. National Council of Teachers of English, Sept. 2009. Web. 10 Oct. 2009.

Brooks advocates a more serious reading of Marshall McLuhan And Quentin Fiore’s “The Media Is the Massage” through the use of Scott McCloud’s text “Understanding Comics”. Brooks argues that a sophisticated pedagogy for visual-verbal reading has not been developed due to an assumption that such texts have limited academic merit. Thus, previous critiques of the “The Medium Is the Massage” fall back on unspecific terms to describe the multi-modal material, such as “juxtaposition” and “hybridization”. This vocabulary does not elucidate the different kinds of ‘closure,’ or hermeneutical engagement, which word and picture texts enact. McCloud’s book outlines six “picture-picture” relationships and seven “picture-word” relationships that imply distinct narrative functions. Brooks uses McCloud’s outline to interpret excerpts from “The Medium Is the Message,” and thus demonstrates how seemingly obscure visual-verbal material can crystallize under deliberate analytic scrutiny. The article concludes with a call for educators, artists, and scholars to use “The Medium Is the Massage” and McCloud as tools to initiate innovative visual-verbal thinking.

McMahon, Jennifer A. "The Perceptual Constraints on Pictorial Realism." Contemporary Aesthetics 4 (2006). Contemporary Aesthetics. Rhode Island School of Design, 18 Jan. 2006. Web. 10 Oct. 2009.

If pictorial realism is defined as the degree to which a visual depiction can be recognized as an object, then cultural perceptual training must affect perceptions of realism. McMahon argues that, in pictorial cognition, the visual data received by the brain does not form a distinct presentation until the data is organized under a ‘descriptive’ configuration. This occurs because pictorial perceptions differ from perceptions of everyday reality. Normally, two distinct cell groups judge spatial relationships and inter-object relationships; in pictorial perception, the latter group judges both. In order to understand the visual complexity of the pictorial space, the mind recalls previous configurations of similar arrangements as an organizational template. Thus, past experiences condition present determinations of what data is crucial to understand the image. This theory accounts for culturally specific understandings of realism, and historical evolutions of realism within cultures. Further, this approach supports the possibility of discovering new realisms in old artworks, because the individual’s perceptual history conditions what is “seen” in the work itself.



Yates, Cristopher S. "A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Cinematic 'Worlds'" Contemporary Aesthetics `4 (2006). Contemporary Aesthetics. Rhode Island School of Design, 22 Oct. 2006. Web. 10 Oct. 2009.

Yates argues that, through film, two worlds converge: that of the viewer and that of the artistic object. This event demands a phenomenological film aesthetics, which has not yet been sufficiently elaborated. Yates proposes an interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s aesthetic theory for the film medium, which draws from Stanley Cavell and Mikel Dufrenne’s respective work on film and philosophy. Heidegger argues that the work of art creates an “open region” in the viewer’s world, in which the object’s artistic intentionality invites the viewer to consider how all reality is imbued with meaning. Stanley Cavell argues that the temporal and spatial qualities of film and the cinema may heighten the viewer’s sensitivity to this type of aesthetic reception. However, Cavell stops short of explaining how the film world actively engages with the viewer’s distinct reality. Yates draws on Mikel Dufrenne’s adaptation of Husserl’s concept of “reduction” to clarify this process. Dufrenne asserts that film viewers focus their attention on “the plane of experience,” rather than general object cognition, and thus internalize the film’s distinct perspective. The article concludes with examples of films by director Terrence Malick, which direct the viewer toward world convergence.