Re-View of Seeing & Writing

How this reader will help students become better writers, I have no idea. Merely asking students to write down their feelings and impressions does not guarantee improved prose. The " book-related website," now under construction, promises various instructional resources ranging from guided exercises and web-based research activities, to annotated links, and doorways to virtual museums. But there is already too much here in these 563 pages; the dazzling superficiality flattens out all experience--from Frank Fournier's photograph of Omayra Sanchez dying in a mudslide in Colombia to Lauren Greenfield's photograph of an anorexic teen on a scale, encouraged by her family in Santa Monica. The result is numbed giddiness, in the sense Baudrillard uses the term in his Ecstasy of Communication. Serious authors, like Susan Sontag or John Berger, who could at least help students improve their skills of analysis with appropriate distinctions and some sense of purpose, are here represented only in rather useless sound-bite snippets. For instance, although Sontag claims clearly here that "Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events" (184), students are not asked to test this standard against anything, or to use the process of writing about it to probe Sontag's assertion of complicity. Rather, that opportunity is missed. Students, instead, are invited to compare photos of their parents' wedding with a more recent one they attended, or to write about the importance of photographs to their sense of family. Seeing is just not so innocent nor are subjectivities so stable as Seeing & Writing suggests. 

Seeing & Writing does provide something useful--a timely reminder of the extent to which information is carried, often simultaneously, on many channels in various media. While its own print limitations restrict it to static "snapshots," its viewers & readers can still appreciate the allusions to video and sound, and regret these limitations for which Seeing & Writing itself cannot be faulted. For example, to hear Robert Pinsky read "On Television" is to understand, both from his own prefatory comments with which he introduces his poems, and from his tone of voice, that this poem is very sad and nostalgic, equally, if not more, about his family and especially about his mother, absent mentally if not physically, than about TV, an interpretation which is eclipsed by the poem's juxtaposition here with Matt Groening's cartoon, "The Simpsons." 

Seeing & Writing's slick, shrink-wrapped sentiment is packaged attractively to be consumed by passive, semi-voyeurs. The presence of manipulating devices is accepted, if not celebrated, with a disturbing complacency. But students already tend to be detached: since all politicians lie, they don't vote. Since all images manipulate, they make no distinction in the messages conveyed, and are equally gullible and vulnerable. This cynical passivity has nothing to do with any kind of literacy, visual or otherwise, and should be challenged by educators. What this textbook cries out for, in addition to some writing instruction, are two things: a sense of theoretical distancing and a sense of history. More should be made of the possibility of change, development, hope, intervention, alternatives, agency--revising lives as well as drafts. It is surely the mission of the humanities to challenge this soulless, ironic detachment--this cryptoaesthetic, of cool.

For students, the main value of Seeing & Writing is to provide "an attractive and engaging environment in which they can reflect on--and see reflections of--contemporary American culture" (XII). Whether or not students will really want to read these particular texts arranged according to these particular themes of gender, body, race, icon, image, place, and moment, and therefore to write about them, let alone "in original, coherent, and convincing terms" (VIII), is questionable. Moreover, without adequate theoretical context, these themes, in spite of their catchy titles, "Engendering Difference," "Constructing Race," remain naively essentialist. 

For instructors, this picture book implies a professional obligation to help students understand how images can be used as rhetorical tools, but Seeing & Writing offers no concrete, practical instruction in such analysis that instructors could use in a sequence of lessons on a day to day basis in the classroom. Its limits are an abstract faith that "careful seeing leads to effective writing" (XLV). To get curriculum materials that do provide students with specific help in the techniques of moving on from this beginning of "careful seeing," and in managing the often arduous, strategic process that arrives ultimately at "effective writing," instructors must go elsewhere, for instance, to the classification system of terms, essential principles, tips, techniques, illustration, and strategies, presented in the 28 pages of Chapter 11, "Effective Visual Design," in another new textbook, Good Reasons by Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer (334 pp., $24, Allyn and Bacon, 2000). Those pages, coupled with the first 7 pages (including the illustrations) of "Signs are Taken for Wonders: The Billboard Field as Poetic Space, a chapter in Marjorie Perloff's Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, would comprise a superior reader for teaching visual rhetoric. Perloff bases her distinctions on the analysis of literature and architecture. A useful alternative or complement to Perloff's critical theory approach to the analysis of images would be Jay David Bolter's valuable historical account of the development of print culture, and of the theoretical principles involved in analyzing the conjunctions of "Seeing and Writing," in the chapter, so titled in his Writing Space (remind me). Even better, as alternative teaching material about this crucially important issue of visual literacy, would be all three texts, thereby combining nuts and bolts techniques with a theoretical and historical context, all of which are missing in Seeing & Writing . 

Seeing & Writing will be seen (and liked or loathed) by various instructors in different ways for different reasons. To find out more, take the quiz:

Get me back to the beginning.

by Ellen Strenski, University of California, Irvine, March 2000