Abstract: The article examines the Francophone paradigm in the visual communication studies, formulated in the second half of the last century in the texts of Roland Barthes, Jacques Durand, Jean -Marie Flush, Saint – Martin and the Group μ, defined as the “rhetoric of the image” and /or “visual rhetoric”. The proposed analysis aims to clarify the ways in which Liege’s theory of visual rhetoric provides a common methodological resource for interdisciplinary research carried out at the border between the theory of visual communication, semiotics and aesthetics, focusing on exclusive cultural anthropological relevance of the semiotic analysis of visual. The paper is particularly focused on the genesis of visual communication model proposed from the Paris semiotic school (“rhétorique de l’image”) and its transformation into the “visual semiotic” (“semiotique visuelle”) theory of the Liege School of neorhetoric. Differentiating the Neorhetoric of argumentation (la néo-rhétorique de l’argumentation) from the Neorhetoric of the figures (la néo-rhétorique des figures) the article exposes systematically the Liege theory of ‘visual sign’ – a core concept of the Belgian structuralist project for a new visual semiotics formulated over the past few decades.The paper’s objectivity is to demonstrate how within the Liege proposal semiotics and rhetoric are defined as a complementary key for the modern theory of communication research that directly affects processes of visual communication itself, as well as the social processes constructed through the visual.
Key words: visual rhetoric, visual sign, Neorhetoric of the figures, visual communication.
Rhetoric and Communications Е-Journal, Issue 12, April 2014, http://rhetoric.bg/, ISSN 1314-4464