Session 9: Language Facets of the Visual

Session 9: Language Facets of the Visual
Chair: Iva Jetvic

Demystifying the Visual: Post-secondary Visual Literacy
Chris McCauley
College for Creative Studies, Liberal Arts Department, Detroit, Michigan

This paper offers a pedagogy for teaching visual literacy on the collegiate level  that seeks to awaken students to the “invisible visible” of their surrounding culture(s) by providing them a paradigm for the analytic evaluation of visual texts.
The methodology utilizes the structuralist model of semiotics, especially as expanded beyond linguistics by later theoreticians like Barthes, Metz, Eco and Kristeva. Semiotics, however, is not enough.
Any exemplar must also address issues of context, cultural mythology, identity, subjectivity, discourse, knowledge, motivation, ideology, hegemony and others that ultimately influence the reading of any text, visual or otherwise.
These external principles directly influence the decoding of meaning(s) from individual texts though many of us are insentient to them. By familiarizing students with post-structural doctrine one offers them important conceptual tools through which they become aware of their own participation in the construction, maintenance and re-iteration of the cultural reality they tacitly endorse in the process of simply ingesting visual imagery strictly “as is”.
In this model students become capable of analyzing imagery in order to identify the “mainstream” meaning(s) of the text and are equipped to enunciate oppositional and negotiated readings of same. They learn to discern the prevailing ideology at the heart of the visual text, the mythology employed or evoked therein, and the structures employed to create the image in question.
Semiotics offers a method of investigation for revealing the structure of images and the methodology used in constructing meaning within them. Post-structuralist concepts demonstrate the external pressures brought to bear on the decoding viewer, and the essential role of visual texts in maintaining the cultural context within which they appear.
In learning and applying these valuable concepts, students become active participants in the realm of the visual and can thus take a more proactive role in constructing their visual culture.

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The Vocabulary of Ageing: Image and Word in Antjie Krog’s Body Bereft
Adéle Nel
North-West University, Vaaltriangle Campus, Vanderbijlpark, South-Africa

Words and images drink the same wine.
There is no purity to protect.
Marlene Dumas

Hey nonny nonny no,
why has my body forsaken me so?
Antjie Krog

“The vocabulary of ageing: How did one master it? More importantly: Where did one find it? What did it consist of?” This is how the prize-winning Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog formulates the central concern of her latest volume of poems, Body Bereft (2006). Krog once observed that “in the beginning is seeing”. The “beginning” for the reader of Body Bereft is a confrontational photograph on the cover of the volume. The photograph, by the internationally acclaimed photographer David Goldblatt, shows an ageing woman’s naked upper body. The image communicates female corporeality in its full register, and offers an alternative to the passive, colonising, patronising convention of identifying women with beauty, and beauty with young women. Goldblatt defies convention when he sexualises the subject in his photograph. He initiates a discourse on important issues: issues of representation, gender, the body and old age, vision, as well as the intricate relationships between these issues.
Krog is regarded as a poet of renewal in Afrikaans literature, and not only with respect to the image of women. In his article, The Birth of the ‘New Woman’: Antjie Krog and Gynogenesis as a Discourse of Power, Beukes (2003) argues that we find in her poetry a recording of the woman who has reclaimed her body, but who has also recovered the text as metaphor of the body. It may therefore be argued that Krog has reclaimed the bereft body through the text. Krog has produced a word text which gives a relentlessly honest view of the decaying, disintegrating body and reverberates a wide register of emotions such as anger and resistance, but also melancholy, loss and mourning. Her tone varies from vulnerability to a fierce forthrightness (often expressed in crude language), and she does not hesitate to violate poetic decorum.
This paper will focus in the first instance on the discourse of the visual text, in other words, the way the image/text in the cover photograph converges with the naked ageing body as its subject. The second focus will be on Krog’s “vocabulary of ageing” in Body Bereft as well as the interaction between word and image in the collection of poems.

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The Grammar of Visual Design : Semiotics in Popular Pakistani Women’s Magazines
Shirin Zubair
Department of English, Baha-ud-Din Zakariya University, Multan, Pakistan

I situate my research within the paradigm of  New Literacy Studies viewing literacy  as a socio-political construct which includes reading of visual symbols and signs. Often drawing on the tradition of semiotics, literacy researchers study the reading of all kinds of signs, texts from price labels to stop signs, recipes, newspapers, junk mail and electronic text.  In this paper, I deconstruct semiotic representations in the discourse(s) of popular Pakistani women’s magazines which are read by millions of women across Pakistan. These images?along with other similar media representations of women? are a resource (women) readers draw upon in constructing their identities: women read these magazines not only as a source of pleasure but also in quest of their identity. Drawing on  Kress and Van Leewen’s ( 2006) theory of social semiotic and Lazar’s ( 2005)  model of feminist critical discourse analysis ,  I present a critique of the images from Pakistani women’s magazines such as Shuaa, Pakeeza , Kiran to argue that these images represent a grammar of visual design : read in conjunction they articulate a certain ideology regarding the construction of Pakistani women’s  identity. Through semiotic analysis of certain sections of the magazines my aim is to point out the underlying normative and ideological assumptions i.e. to show how these magazine representations position the readers; how semiotics weild power in marginalizing the role of women in society. The restrictive nature of discourses on femininities offered are highlighted through analysis of  discursive linguistic and semiotic techniques and devices. I hope to be able to illustrate that the role of  semiotics is central in shaping and reinforcing  asymmetrical, gendered and sexist social patterns and practices and that these images (can) have repercussions with regard to women’s sexuality(ies) and their social roles and identities.

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