Critical Use of Ideographs
At the end of his essay defining the ideograph, McGee says that
“A complete description of an ideology . . . will consist of (1) the isolation of a society’s ideographs, (2) the exposure and analysis of the diachronic structure of every ideography, and (3) characterization of synchronic relationships among all the ideographs in a particular context.”.
Such an exhaustive study of any ideology has yet to materialize, but many scholars have made use of the ideograph as a tool of understanding both specific rhetorical situations as well as a broader scope of ideological history. As a teacher, McGee himself made use of the ideograph as a tool for structuring the study of the rise of liberalism in British public address, focusing on ideographs such as “property,” “patriarchy,” “religion,” “liberty.” Other scholars have made a study of specific uses of ideographs such as “family values” and “equality.” Some critics have gone beyond the idea that an ideograph must be a verbal symbol and have expanded the notion to include photographs and objects represented in the media.
Read more about this topic: Ideograph (rhetoric)
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