Making Sense of Aesthetic & Vernacular Impulses in Regards to Vis Rhet

Here’s my attempt at making sense of all of this. It’s just an attempt:

I can make more sense of aesthetic influences. Aesthetics has to do with feelings, emotional response, sentiments, that might arise as we, say, look at a particular painting, read a particular poem, hear a certain song, ect. Aesthetics, in literature at least, is a study more along the lines of analyzing or gauging what has produced these feelings and why (or, how?). The study of poetics, for instance, is concerned with aesthetics. I suppose that typically aestheticians have gravitated towards that which produces a pleasurable/pleasing feeling. I don’t accept that this is the only sense in which we can use the word aesthetic. I recently read Freud’s famous essay “The Uncanny,” which he states is an exploration of the aesthetic feeling of fear or frightfulness that is somehow vaguely familiar. Therefore, I think aesthetics could probably be as broad as I defined it above. 

The vernacular, on the other hand, seems to be something beyond the personal impression. I like Logan’s-via-Bruce’s-via Elizabeth’s understanding of the vernacular as something that has a direct function or purpose (it’s so many times removed now from the source that who knows if that’s what was originally agreed upon). I admit, I’m struggling to understand this term. I know vernacular as in everyday, common speech that’s specific to a locale and community. I know Dr. Yancey has spoken of vernacular memorials as those visuals which commemorate something. So, I can’t help but read those two meanings into vernacular. In her article we read for this week, Helmers seems to be equating (or relating) the vernacular with collective memory. She writes that “collective memory allows societies to agree on what is important, what should be saved, and what should be commemorated” (77). Thus, in this sense, what is vernacular would be determined by a specific locale and community, similar to the meaning of the word concerning language. This could be seen to go along with what everyone else has been suggesting in their blog posts. For, “everyday” and “ordinary” are determined by one’s context.

The relationship between these influences and visual rhetoric seems to me to be contextual. We bring different personal and cultural milieu to visual texts depending on the time and place in which we interact with them. Particularly, the place seems to make a huge difference; I’m thinking for example of Helmer’s discussion of the Winslow Homer art exhibition, in which the curators crafting (or, directed?) the kind of viewing context that they wanted, which affects the function of the visual.