Art as argument: A rhetorical approach to teaching literature and painting

A rhetorical approach in the classroom which emphasizes questions of audience, purpose, and technique will help to mediate conflicts about content and pedagogy in the literature and art curriculum, will promote critical thinking skills in students, and should encourage a more serious public attitude toward the arts. Chapter 1 examines American practices of teaching literature and art over the last century. Chapter 2 surveys classical and contemporary theories of rhetoric and emphasizes those of Cicero and Chaim Perelman. The survey introduces the three offices of the orator (delighting, moving, instructing) and the five canons of rhetoric, particularly of invention, arrangement, and expression, terms later used in the heuristics this study advocates. Chapter 3 shows how the rhetorical approach has been applied in the past to arts such as literature, painting, architecture, and music. This chapter features the ut pictura poesis tradition of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries and shows how the rhetorical perspective is again emerging. Chapter 4 applies a rhetorical framework to the analysis of advertisements (the quintessential example of a rhetorical art), poems, and paintings. Chapter 5 ends by underlining similarities between the general critical thinker and higher order cognition in the arts and showing how the rhetorical approach can cultivate sensitivity and higher-order thinking skills.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Goldsmith-Conley, Elizabeth Harriet

Contributors dc:contributor

• Smith, Ralph A.

• Education, Art
• Education, Language and Literature
• Education, Curriculum and Instruction

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 1992 Goldsmith-Conley, Elizabeth Harriet

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

AAI9236468
(UMI)AAI9236468

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/21399