Because “[t]he frame from which we operate automatically determines the questions we ask, the knowledge we create, and the praxis we enact,” we should move to a frame of polymorphic literacy (615). “Polymorphism invites an exploration of the subtle tension among kinds of images (mental, graphic, etc.) and modalities of images (visual, kinesthetic, etc.), offering a different entry into meaning” (616-7).
She discusses interactions of image and word. “After all, a word is first an image: visual or auditory. Thus, we cannot say whether image or word is first; we cannot ascertain which is the cause and which is the end. Rather, we are forced by the circularity of image and word to recognize that to have one we must have the other” (619). “Polymorphic literacy opens up our classrooms to this fluidity, inviting explorations of the points where meanings shift as a result of the transaction between image and word, image and image” (617).
Fleckenstein does not like the term visual rhetoric because it “is problematic for four reasons. First, it reduces the richness of imagery to a single modality-the visual-barring us from an exploration of alternative modalities of imagery … Second, visual rhetoric ties us unnecessarily to the graphic incarnation of imagery, preventing us from exploring the mental and verbal aspects of imagery. Third, by limiting imagery to the visual and the visually graphic, visual rhetoric truncates any investigation into the porous nature of imagery, the nesting of modalities-sound, vision, texture, kinesthesia, and so forth-in the same image and the nesting of types of images-mental, graphic, and verbal-within a single experience. Fourth, visual rhetoric frames the visual in terms of the rhetorical, girding it in the discursive logic of the word” (620-1). Instead, we should use the term “image.”
- Mental imagery: accounts for our experience of place as an internal
- Graphic imagery: the construction of place as an external reality, conflicting with and complementing internal maps
- Verbal imagery: an image constructed via language, extending beyond tropes and figures, functioning to describe our reality and shape our perceptions of what we describe
Key Terms
- transactional writing: “writing designed to elicit an action in the world” (612)
- polymorphic literacy: “reading and writing that draw on verbal and nonverbal ways of shaping meaning” (613); “emphasizes the reality that meaning shapes itself in response to the dictates of different media, modes, and contexts of representation” (615)