Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature

by Dobrin, Sidney I.; Morey, Sean

• ISBN13: 9781438425849
• ISBN10: 1438425848
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-09
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

How do supporters of the environmental movement manipulate and promote images of "nature" to achieve support and sympathy? From the Sierra Club's use of Ansel Adams's stark and pristine portraits of the western United States to close-ups of plastic bottles and dead fish floating in Rust Belt waterways, visual depictions of landscapes and the degradation caused by humans have profoundly shaped popular notions of environmentalism and the environment. Despite the rhetorical power of images connected with the environmental movement over the past forty years, scholarship in environmental communication has focused almost exclusively on verbal rather than visual rhetoric. Ecosee offers a deeper and fuller understanding of the communicative strategies and power of the environmental movement by looking closely at the visual rhetorics involved in photographs, paintings, television and filmic images, video games, and other forms of image-based media. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Sidney I. Dobrin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida and has written or edited many books, including (with Christopher J. Keller) Writing Environments and (with Christian R. Weisser) Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition, both also published by Suny Press. Sean Morey is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Florida.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: Ecosee: A First Glimpse	p. 1
How We See
A Rhetorical Look at Ecosee	p. 23
Ecoporn: On the Limits of Visualizing the Nonhuman	p. 53
Ecology, Images, and Scripto-Visual Rhetoric	p. 79
Field Guides to Birds: Images and Image/Text Positioned as References	p. 95
Eduardo Kac: Networks as Medium and Trope	p. 113
Seeing Animals
From Dead Meat to Glow-in-the-Dark Bunnies: Seeing "the Animal Question" in Contemporary Art	p. 129
"They're There, and That's How We're Seeing It": Olly and Suzi in the Antarctic	p. 153
Connecting with Animals: The Aquarium and the Dreamer Fish	p. 169
Seeing Landscapes and Seascapes
Farming on Irish Film: An Ecological Reading	p. 185
Postcards from the Andes: Politics of Representation in a Reimagined	p. 203
That's Not a Reef. Now That's a Reef: A Century of (Re) Placing the Great Barrier Reef	p. 223
Seeing in Space and Time
Evading Capture: The Productive Resistance of Photography in Environmental Representation	p. 239
The Test of Time: McLuhan, Space, and the Rise of Civilization	p. 257
Seeing the Climate?: The Problematic Status of Visual Evidence in Climate Change Campaigning	p. 279
Afterword	p. 299
List of Contributors	p. 311
Index	p. 315
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