These texts can help students get acquainted with issues of character presentation. They can be used as discussion starters, and they can help students situate the selfie as the object of rhetorical inquiry. The instructor can select additional readings. Also, the instructor can guide students to find additional sources using databases. Since selfies are a very contemporary topic, we suggest periodically checking how selfies are discussed in the national media.

 

Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001.

• Isocrates: Antidosis (75-79)

• Aristotle: Rhetoric (Book I, 179-186; Book II, 213-219)

• Cicero: De Oratore (297-300; 328-331)

• Quintilian: Institutes of Oratory (Book XII, 412-418)

• Kenneth Burke: A Rhetoric of Motives (1324-1340)

• Michel Foucault: The Archaeology of Knowledge (1436-1445)

 

Blair, J. Anthony. “The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments.” Defining Visual Rhetorics. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers, eds. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. 41-62.

 

Brittain-Richardson, Kathy. “Front-Stage and Back-Stage Kantian Ethics: Promoting Truth and Trust in Social Media Communities.” Social Media and The Value of Truth. Berrin Beasley and Mitchell Haney, eds. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013. 5-16.

 

Brooks, David. “The Character Factory.” New York Times 1 August 2014: A23.

 

Coates, David. “Responding to David Brooks: The Question of Poverty and Character.” Huffington Post 6 August 2014.

 

Deuze, Mark. “Media Life.” Media Perspectives for the 21st Century. Stylianos Papathanassopoulos, ed. New York: Routledge, 2011. 137-148.

 

Foss, Sonja K. “Theory of Visual Rhetoric.” Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, methods, and Media. Ken Smith et al., eds. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005. 141-152.

 

Lutkewitte, Claire, ed. Multimodal Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2014.

• Jeff Rice: “Imagery” (89-112)

• Gunther Kress: “Gains and Losses: New Forms of Texts, Knowledge, and Learning” (283-301)

 

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium is the Message.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Boston: MIT Press, 1994. 7-21.

 

Zappavigna, Michele. “Ambient Affiliation.” Discourse on Twitter and Social Media. London: Continuum, 2012. 83-99.