Configurative Rhetoric

CONFIGURATIVE RHETORIC: THE ROLE OF AESTHETIC DESIGN IN PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION BY AMY DOLORES DALZELL, MAIS A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School in partial fulfillment o f the requirements for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Major Subject: RHETORIC AND PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico August 2014 Copyright 2014 by Amy Dolores Dalzell UMI Number: 3582401 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Di!ss0?t&iori Publishing UMI 3582401 Published by ProQuest LLC 2015. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 “Configurative Rhetoric: The Role of Aesthetic Design in Professional Communication,” a dissertation prepared by Amy Dolores Dalzell in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree, Doctor o f Philosophy, has been approved by the following: Loui Reyes Dean ad interim Graduate School Monica Torres Chair of Examining Committee C 7/ Date Committee in Charge: Dr. Monica Torres, Chair Dr. Christopher Burnham Dr. Jennifer Sheppard Dr. Stephanie Taylor DEDICATION the memory of C. H. Imera, my mentor in both aesthetics and academics. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT My first acknowledgement would be not so much of a ‘whom’ as a ‘where.’ Growing up outside of New York City, beginning from the age of about three, I commuted into the city with my father, and spent my formative years in screening and editing rooms, surrounded by carpeted walls and six-foot projectors hidden behind interior windows, in places like Magno Sound and Paul Killiam Studios. Thus, I came away with a keen sense of culture as a collection of humanly generated, and neatly arranged, multi-faceted micro-environments in a truly Olmsted-esque sense. I rediscovered this early impression in college under the tutelage of painter Mark Perlman (http://www.markperlman.net/) who had the magical Taoist ‘knack’ of bringing out the best in whatever was already apparent in his students’ work, as opposed to imposing his own style. As a result, his students produced a wide variety of visual approaches with an enthusiastic sense of themselves in their work. The next acknowledgement would be the late Dr. David L. Hall, a Continental philosopher steeped in Eastern aesthetic culture, who devoted much of his work to using that familiarity as a lens to critique the cultural assumptions and priorities of the West. His attempts to create a cross-cultural connection between the two philosophical polarities are culturally significant in a global sense with particular relevance to technical writing and Cultural Studies. Others to be mentioned, who were also lowly graduate students at the time, are Sana Shelton Clason, who more than once kept me from flying off the handle in a fit of pique, as is sometimes my wont, and Sipai Klein, who has almost as oblique a take on the cultural role of rhetoric as, some would say, I have - his involving various combinations of science and poetry. My son, Christopher, also falls into this category, helping with the plebian tasks of proofreading and revision, but also stopping me from throwing the computer out the window on more than one occasion. My dissertation committee has, as seems to be the norm, evolved over time. I thank Dr. Christine Eber for initially coming on board, and I also thank Dr. Stephanie Taylor for stepping in when Dr. Eber retired. I thank both Dr. Chris Burnham and Dr. Jennifer Sheppard for agreeing to escort into the academic world something of a maverick through the dissertation process. I am most indebted to Dr. Monica Torres who must have initially thought that I was spinning off into the middle of nowhere with my attempts to conjoin verbal forms of communication with visual/spatial concerns. My sincere hope is that this collaboration will provide direction for both professional communicators on the academic side of the campus as well as for conceptual artists seeking to create and present their own individual works to a wider audience. VITA 1989 BFA in Painting, University of Texas at El Paso 1993 MAIS Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Texas at El Paso 2004 - 2009 Graduate Assistant, English Department, New Mexico State University 2004 - 2006 Writing Center Associate, New Mexico State University 2 0 0 8 -2 0 0 9 Coordinator ENGL 211 Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences 2009 - 2014 Adjunct Faculty, Department of English, New Mexico State University SELECT PUBLICATIONS Dalzell (2006). Frameworks: Images o f design. In S. Brown & C. Nims (Eds.) Paideia 9: Gateways to English 111 at New Mexico State University. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Clason, S.S. & Dalzell, A., Ford, C. & Klein, S. (Eds.) (2007). Paideia 10: Gateways to English 111 at New Mexico State University. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Thatcher B., Barrantes, E., Dalzell, A., Dong, Q., Ford, C., Gallagher, R.,et al. (2007) Web site analysis across cultures: An inquiry into Intercultural values and web site design. In K. Amant (Ed.)Linguistic and cultural online communication issues in the global age (pp. 124 - 142). Hershey: Information Science Reference. Clason, S.S. & Dalzell, A. (Eds.). (2008). Paideia 11: Gateways to English 111, Rhetoric & Communication at New Mexico State University. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co. FIELD OF STUDY Major Field: Rhetoric and Professional Communication ABSTRACT THE ROLE OF AESTHETIC DESIGN IN RHETORIC & PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION This study involves conducting a rhetorically configurative analysis of an architectural interior, where ‘configurative’ is defined as a set of visual/spatial interrelations perceived within a given context or framework. Specifically, the purpose of this project is to re-animate not only awareness of context, but also the imagination in its role in the creation of human significance in designing spaces. Technological changes in communication directly affect the relevance of rhetoric to the development and continuation of culture. Shifts in rhetorical modalities, therefore, may eventually constitute cross-cultural transitions in sharing experiences. Thus, to maintain continuity of meaning, it becomes incumbent on professional communicators to develop a working familiarity with contemporary socio-cultural changes, particularly those changes that involve a transition from one form of communicative form to another According to rhetorician Ernest Grassi (1980, 1994) culture itself is rhetorical, i.e., a by-product of the human need for the psyche to achieve and, more importantly, to share meaning. For Grassi, this adaptation o f nature involves a metaphoric transfer o f meaning from inner understandingonto the physical world. To do this, however, there must be some means, some venue, available to create a common connection between the two realms. Language has been such a venue, and, print, until recently in the West, has been the predominant communicative modality for the maintenance and transmission of culture. One cultural consequence of this adaptation is that written/printed communications deliberately hold form constant so as not to interfere with the transparent dissemination of information, as content. Electronic modalities, however, complicate this cultural communicative assumption in that: (1) virtual form can no longer be routinely subordinated to content, and (2) ‘knowledge’ when experienced as simultaneous pattern need not be distanced and ‘provable’ to be valid, Grassi’s understanding of metaphor as the link between rhetoric and culture (1980, 1994), in effect, characterizes metaphor as a hybrid communicative form that bridges the gap between rational/linguistic and aesthetic/configurative forms via human ingenuity. This approach has been explored on the linguistic/rhetorical side as generative criticism (Foss, 2004) where the researcher must create and/or design/construct a singular critical framework through which to interpret an unusual artifact. On the aesthetic/rhetorical side, however, Bauhaus artist Wassily Kandinsky’s analytical drawing process and correspondence color theory practicably elucidate design as a communicative system (Poling 1986). This proposed visual/spatial analysis of the interior the lobby of the rotunda of Skeen hall is intended to depict an architectural interior as schematized space that will illustrate the processing inherent to Grassi’s imagistic first principles, i.e., thearchai, remnants of a primordial language (Grassi, 1994) where deductive reasoning finds its source, but that cannot, in and of themselves, be discovered via deduction (Grassi, 1980). In this view, the archai represent the collective sources of ingenium which allow humans to overcome their alienation from nature through the figurative development of human meaning that the rawness of the natural world alone cannot provide. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: The Problem of Meaning.......................................1 Introduction..........................................................................................1 Extra-verbal Modalities ...................................................................1 Form as Content..............................................................................

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