Finding form, the rhetoric of television advertising

Abstract

The basic proposal of the dissertation is to elaborate a model of analysis which: 1) provides a common set of terms that sociologists, psychologists and linguists can use to name the structural, component parts of television advertisements; 2) can complement sociological studies on ads by clarifying how issues such as values, social groups, subjectivity, etc. are constructed discursively and symbolically through the audiovisual mode of communication; 3) can complement psychological studies of persuasive techniques that focus on the stimulus-response model by bringing into greater focus how the stimulus (the ad) is constructed; 4) and provides a higher level domain into which linguistic phenomena (simple sound tropes as well as more complex figures like metaphor, the use of personal pronouns, verb tenses, etc.) can be contextualized. I apply Kenneth Burke's model of rhetoric, the Dramatistic Pentad, to analyzing ads and follow that up with a formalistic analysis of the audiovisual elements in ads. This model has brought to light interesting new insights into how subjectivity is created, how and why ads have developed from the 1950s to the late 1990s, how values are constructed, and should prove to be an interesting tool for promoting interdisciplinary discussion of television advertising.