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Students were presented with my thesis about
the posters that fit the particular agenda of the classroom situation.
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Through appeals to pathos,
both verbally and visually, posters that initially were designed merely
to find individual persons missing after the destruction of the World Trade
Center ultimately served many other rhetorical purposes. The posters
present memorials to fallen heroes, statements of kinship to the missing,
placards of potential political dissent from victims' families, and static
representations of the multiplicity of social, class, and gender roles
that workers necessarily occupy in our contemporary transactional economy. |
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But many students resisted a clinical categorization
of their emotional responses. They felt that such theorizing was supplemental
to the function of the posters as images, the semiotics of which were self-contained. For example, student Emily Mullen found ample clues
with which to decode her reactions without looking beyond the image to ideological critique.
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The two missing persons' posters
whose URLs are listed above are very different visually. The second one,
depicting Gertude (Trudi) Alagero, is very professional looking. It has
pictures that show a variety of views of Alagero in different settings.
She is very relaxed and happy looking in all of the pictures, so one almost
forgets what they are looking at until they read further and see the jewelry
listed, engagement ring, and the person to contact, her fiancé.
The first flyer, Eric Andrew Lehrfeld, is very different. It immediately
defines this man as a family man, since he is shown in all pictures with
a very young child. The flyer is also not professional, it looks like the
photos were attached with tape, and the name and phone number are hand
written. These factors make this flyer more immediately upsetting
to the viewer. |
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