Convergences: Message, Method, Medium

by Robert Atwan

With a unique focus on message, method, and medium, Convergences asks students to think about what, why, and how we communicate. What's the best way to tell the story of your life, through words or pictures? How would the Gettysburg Address be received if Lincoln had delivered it on PowerPoint? Why did Benetton design a marketing campaign around death row inmates? Convergences asks these questions, among others. Convergences has been put together to help students explore the many different kinds of compositions that surround them. Clusters bring together texts from multiple media and genres -- essays, advertisements, the Web, news, comics, television, and film, among others -- with a methodology to read them. And the new edition does even more to suggest a vocabulary students can use to talk about all kinds of texts, both in the book and in ix -- a ground-breaking CD-ROM exploring fundamental concepts of visual rhetoric -- that comes with every copy of Convergences .

621 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Robert Atwan has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide.