Visual Rhetoric: Attempts to Transform the Rhetorical System to the World of the Visual Image.

Résumé

The author provides, at the beginning of this paper, an overview of the history of Western rhetoric that has been expanded in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, to witness in the later stages a movement of contraction and decline and end at last to become just an ornamental rhetoric, after being a tool used by Aristotle to discover the possible ways to achieve persuasion in different topics.

The author reveals, in the next section, the great mutation that rhetoric witnessed in the mid-twentieth century. Rhetoric had recognized a rebirth accompanied by calls to expand its scope in order to encompass the study of non-linguistic discourses.

The third section is devoted to the Presentation of the first attempts to transfer the rhetorical theory to the visual world. This attempt led by J. Durand remains limited, because he takes the rhetoric in a very narrow sense.

In the last section, the author presents some contemporary approaches followed Aristotle in establishing a strong link between rhetoric and persuasion, and then assigned to the visual image an argumentative function. Instead of looking in visual images figure of speech like metaphors, the focus is put on the ways of persuasion achieved by visual images.