This multimedia "essay" will challenge John Berger's famous premise "Seeing comes before words" by presenting an impressionistic collage of images of landmark writing and writers. The narration accompanying these images will argue that even Berger's non-textual "essays" are shaped by words and writing as much as they are by images and seeing. The force of this presentation will be to suggest that the term *representation* should become increasingly useful as the traditional divisions between seeing and writing collapse in response to inrceasingly multimedia communication and composition technologies. The point of this presentation will be to suggest ways that writing instructors and rhetorical theorists can begin to explore in depth visual rhetoric and its relationship(s) with student writers in the late 1990s.

Presenter: Todd W. Taylor

Category: Theory and criticism

Target Audience: Advanced