Response to Stroupe's "Visualizing English"

Stroupe presents an argument that even the most traditional English Departments need to embrace digital literacy. He reiterates the idea that even images on their own can support the theory of elaborationism. The process of understanding an image, Stroupe claims, can lead to more "critical forms of consciousness" (609). He supports this theory as he analyzes images from traditional, modernism, humanist print texts. I found this part of the article interesting. Yes, analyzing images can lead to critical thinking and sometimes images can be worth a thousand words, but I found myself questioning if the process of analyzing images alone falls under the literacy of English Department. Does such a claim steal from the art department?

However, Stroupe evades this quandary for the most part by focusing on the ways that "verbal" (text) and "visual" (images, videos) speak together in a particular work (611). For Stroupe, and for most readers, the rhetorical effect is strongest when the two complement each other. Stroupe uses a cooking metaphor to describe the different ways that these ingredients can work together to produce flavor or counteract each other (624). I found this metaphor useful but a little patronizing. His examples, like the Victorian website, proved his point in a better way. I agree that in the best literature, “words don’t simply talk to words, but to images, links, horizontal lines—to every feature of the iconography page” (620). As Peterson and Wyosacki noted last week, even the verbal literature on a page is interactive and an art form.

However, for a writer so concerned

about the flow between images and

ideas, I found his article failed on

this front. I often had to scroll to find

the image he referenced. Perhaps the

original version of this text was more

successful in this manner?

(This is a screen shot to show that the images were on a

separate page from the text describing those images)

Finally, the most meaningful part of the article for me was the discussion of power. Stroupe quotes Elbow and Castro to assert that language is and has always been about power. Therefore, the web is also about power. The traditional distribution of author-publisher-store-reader have been pre-empted forever. One of the most successful writers last year was self published exclusively online. Castro goes a step further and explains that the web is now the medium historians will use to analyze history. These are ideas I have heard before but I found them exciting in this article because Stroupe directly challenges English Departments and questions their intentions. If literacy is power, and the web literacy is dominant, then who are English Departments excluding with their traditional methods? He implies that they are resistant to change because this is an area where they lack power that other people have.