Meaning and semiotics

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Visual rhetoric and persuasion

Lesson 5 of 9 in Meaning and semiotics.

Visual Rhetoric: How Imagery Persuades · ProfessorGraves
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Visual rhetoric en.wikipedia.org treats a picture as an argument and borrows the apparatus of classical rhetoric to take it apart. Roland Barthes did much of the work of carrying it across, applying the analysis to the still photograph in 1964 (in English in 1977), and his earlier Mythologies en.wikipedia.org of 1957 had already taken wrestling matches, soap powder and a Paris Match cover of a saluting soldier as systems of meaning rather than as things that happened. In advertising the moves get names. Juxtaposition, fusion, replacement, and a dozen relatives of those, all of which amount to setting two things near each other and letting the viewer do the joining.

the thingyou are sellingthe thingeveryone knowsone shared property, and only onewiden the overlap and the metaphor stops meaning anything
Two unrelated domains joined by one shared property, which is the whole metaphor.
A colour lithograph poster. A woman in a black dress and wide hat sits in the foreground in near-silhouette; behind her a man in a top hat with a yellow face and red beard leans towards her; on the stage beyond, a singer in long black gloves is cut off above the shoulders by the edge of the picture. Hand-lettered text reads Divan Japonais, 75 rue des Martyrs, and Ed Fournier directeur.
Toulouse-Lautrec's poster for the Divan Japonais cabaret. The woman in black is placed so the eye lands on her first, then travels to the stage.Divan Japonais. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, colour lithograph, 1893.Wikimedia Commons/Public domain
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “The study of how images persuade, using tools built originally for analysing speech.”

    • Index
    • Icon
    • Visual rhetoric
    • Code
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Putting two images side by side so the viewer builds the claim that connects them.”

    • Counter
    • First reading
    • Multistable perception
    • Juxtaposition
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Standing one thing where another should be, so its qualities transfer without anyone saying so.”

    • Replacement
    • Fusion
    • Target
    • Source

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