One of the key reasons that have been put forward for justifying the superior argumentative force of visuals over verbal arguments in advertising discourse is their immediacy. The immediate resonance of visuals and their forceful appeal bear considerable resemblance to the argumentative force of enthymemes as hidden premises in informal rhetorical argumentation. In this article an attempt is made at bridging the logical and pathemic appeals of enthymemes under the aegis of what may be called the pathology of the enthymeme, while demonstrating that what has been pejoratively tagged, since Freudian psychoanalytic discourse, as “the psychopathology of everyday life” in fact constitutes the very underpinning of enthymematic structures and a system of topoi of which such structures constitute an integral part. By assuming as the point of departure of this genealogico-pathological tracing Heidegger’s opening up of the meaning of logos and as destination Heidegger’s ontological reading of everydayness, the enthymematic embeddedness of cultural topoi is depathologized, while being reinserted in its “proper” pathological dimension. The exemplification of how visual enthymemes function and may be translated as hidden premises in advertising discourse seeks to demonstrate the pathology of the enthymeme as “unquestionable” major premises that underpin visual arguments.

Concerns of appropriate housing may arise in older adulthood. Some older adults may make life work in the place we call home; others take steps to voluntarily relocate in anticipation of health and other needs. While moving at any age can be challenging, moving from one's home in later life also represents multiple reflections: past, present, and future selves, control of one's space and relinquishing the care of one's space to another person or corporation, family support and family fissures, and the body's capacities and limitations. Moving is examined as a moment where regimes of value are negotiated through competing semiotic ideologies and at times social roles are transformed. Ethnographic fieldwork occurred from January 2009 to May 2012 in the Midwest United States. This paper presents experiences of relocation of material and social role transformation as older adults make this housing and, writ large, life transition.

Liberal arts education has become highly commodified, but what is the nature of the object commodified? I argue that that objectification is brought together through the branding process in the form of the Good Student, an unambiguously positive image of the product of higher education. Drawing from Peircian concepts and from recent works on branding as semiotic process, I show how college marketers produce this construction. I also argue that the Good Student is particularly suited to objectifying liberal arts education because of the peculiar qualities of liberal arts education: it does not train students for particular jobs, it is notoriously diffuse in academic content, and it is largely about class reproduction. The Good Student stands in as the ideal neoliberal middle-class product of such education: intelligent, flexible, self-controlled, productive, and socially safe.

This essay compares representations of religious conversion in four Italian chivalric poems: Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Semiotically read, they cast new light on the Catholic idea of the religious self in its development from the late Middle Ages throughout the early modern era. In this evolution, the Council of Trent represents a fundamental watershed.

This study presents an alternative interpretation of one of the most aesthetically charged objects known from southwestern Mesoamerica, a tripod vessel seemingly manufactured in the fifteenth century CE. The analysis links the content of the visual narrative painted on the vessel with the use of the object, a function glyphically described around its neck. I argue that the binary structure of the depicted imagery and of the myth of origin encoded in the narrative was dialectically projected into the historical social field that motivated the commissioning of the artifact: a marital alliance to unite two powerful noble houses in order to forge a new dynasty. The deployment of the vessel to drink cacao during a marriage ceremony helps explain how its inscribed surface was meant to be read, and the depicted archetypical toponyms are hypothetically identified with lived places in the valleys of Nochixtlan and Coixtlahuaca.