Thoughts for Today
Because we cannot separate our words from images without wrenching away meaning and meaningfulness, we need to open the door to imagery. By doing so, we can better understand and teach the difficulties and exhilarations of writing, reading, and literature. By focusing on the play of language and image, we can help our students resonate to, rather than resist, language arts. Such an endeavor does not require that we attend to imagery to the detriment of language. Rather, such an endeavor requires that we nuance our sense of meaning by welcoming into our classrooms the necessary transaction between imagery and language.
—Kristie S. Fleckenstein (“Inviting Imagery” 5)1
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[T]he goal of rhetorical mnemotechnical craft was not to give students a prodigious memory for all the information they might be asked to repeat in an examination, but to give an orator the means and wherewithal to invent his material, both beforehand and – crucially – on the spot. Memoria is most usefully thought of as a compositional art. The arts of memory are among the arts of thinking, especially involved with fostering the qualities we now revere as “imagination” and “creativity.”
—Mary Carruthers (The Craft of Thought 9)2
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[O]ne might argue that transmission itself is a mode of memory, that memory is a dynamic process informed by the cognitive experiences through which images are fashioned.
—Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion (2-3)3
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- Fleckenstein, Kristie S. “Inviting Imagery in Our Classrooms.” Language and Image in the Reading-Writing Classroom: Teaching Vision. Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Linda T. Calendrillo, and Demetrice A. Worley Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. 3-26. [↩]
- Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400 – 1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. [↩]
- Küchler, Susanne, and Walter Melion. “Introduction: Memory, Cognition, and Image Production.” Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation. Ed. Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 1-46. [↩]
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