The image repair rhetoric of Jane Rosenberg, courtroom sketch artist for the Tom Brady “Deflategate” case, expands our understanding of image repair rhetoric at the intersection of sport, legal, and popular communication. This analysis draws on the comprehensive work of Benoit’s typology of image repair. We found that Rosenberg used a number of image repair strategies, including evading responsibility, reducing offensiveness, mortification, and corrective action. Some strategies seemed to function as preemptive image prepare. Additional media coverage adapted much of her rhetoric into conventional, familiar sport narratives, including the “comeback” and/or “redemption” story. We discuss how these strategies fit—or did not—conventional strategies of image repair.
This article employs semiotic analysis as well as marketing theory for examining Japanese advertising. Much advertising, in both Japan and the West, exploits “resonance”—a pairing of image with text in the service of word play. But little has been done to explain how Japanese advertising compares to its Western (primarily American) counterpart. Semiotic analysis of resonance entails interpreting the narrative scripts and frames that are brought into play for the Japanese consumer. These narratives offer a unique window onto Japanese marketing strategies and by extension onto Japanese aesthetics and culture.
This article analyses two theatre pieces by Rabih Mroué as statements and reflections about how images work. “The Pixelated Revolution” (2012) and “Three Posters” (2000) are lecture-performances that probe the power of images in the context of war. Both performances use images “on the brink” of death, the first showing gripping footage from demonstrators in the Syrian civil war and the latter integrating a real video testimony of a Lebanese suicide bomber into the theatre piece. These precarious images between life and death are used to theorise the image in an alternative way. Specifically, Mroué stages the image as self-critical metapictures, as has been theorized by W. J. T. Mitchell. Furthermore, Mroué treats the images as if they were actors, as if they had a life, a death, and ghostly (re)appearances of their own. This relates to Mitchell’s later approach, looking at images as living organisms. If images are alive, what lives do they lead, both within and beyond the theatre?