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.
Robert Atwan is the founder and series editor of the annual Best American Essays. The editor of numerous anthologies, he has written on the ancient literature of the Near East and his critical essays and poetry reviews have appeared in many national periodicals. Laurance Wieder is the author of several volumes of poetry, including The Coronet of Tours; No Harm Done; The Last Century: Selected Poems; and One Hundred Fifty Psalms, a complete psalter. He has taught Bible and Ancient Authors at Cornell University.
