Choosing Readings with Observation as a Primary Method

Edwards, Janis L. and Carol K. Winkler

Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons from Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997)

Edwards and Winkler review literature on visual form and repetitive form that provides suggestive, but limited, explanations for the power and rhetorical function of the image of Joe Rosenthal's 1945 photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. They then articulate a concept of representative form to more fully account for the rhetorical experience and function of the parodied image in cartoons. The piece thus illustrates not only the political cartoons that make use of an easily recognized photographic image, but also demonstrates how scholars read against existing theory by showing how particular examples can call that theory into question.

See class activity on Teaching Reading as a Writer -- Understanding the Writer's Moves (focused on use of sources) using this reading as illustration, class activity teaching Common Writing Issues -- Incorporating Secondary Sources with passages from student drafts, and Jorlyann Marinas' final essay on political cartoons of Mount Rushmore that uses Edwards and Winkler's expansive definition of ideographs. For a description of what we admire in Marinas' essay, see the Additional Resources Overview.

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Last modified: 02/21/08. Contributors to this site include: Margaret Marshall, Andrew Strycharski, April Mann, Isis Artze-Vega, Patty Malloy, John Wafer.