In the passage Representing MacBeth: A Case Study in Visual Rhetoric, Hanno Ehses explores the challenges of designing a document intended to represent a body of text, specifically movie posters and books. Designers are required to depict more than just announce and summarize a media text; they must create works based on the more abstract interpretations. As Ehses dictates that these documents should “mirror the dialectic comprehensibility and attractiveness to stimulate interest and to represent a high degree of information, the full extent of which can only be discerned by the attentive reader” (Ehses 60). After reading about the conceptualization that goes into generating a cover, I began to think of the books I have displayed on my desk and how well the illustrations that accompany them convey the themes within those works.


             One of the few books that I have ever re-read (in this case, three times), is Margaret Mitchell’s epic Gone With the Wind. While this cover is effective in the sense that it is attention grabbing and readable, it could hardly be described as thought provoking. The artwork displayed at the bottom gives the viewer a sense of the novel’s setting, but does not present a compelling case for a prospective reader to explore the material further; the jacket is more informative than it is persuasive. Ehses references theater designer J. Shadbolt, stating, “It’s easy to make an elegant decoration, but quite another thing to evoke exact implication” (Ehses 53).  In the case of the Gone With the Wind cover, the illustration is a literal one that relies on viewers’ easy recognition of it than ingenuity.
           

Conversely, the cover of the modern classic The Great Gatsby utilizes figures of contiguity, creating a more cerebral work of art. The designer of the image on the right makes special use of amplification to demonstrate Fitzgerald’s characterization of Daisy Buchanan and the party lights of Gatsby’s Long Island dwelling. Synecdoche is also incorporated in the substitution of the night sky for a character’s face. The mysterious nature of the cover makes it enticing to those who are unaware of what’s inside.
While I can hardly call myself a literary critic, from now on I will certainly pay more attention to the textual references of the jackets of the books I read.
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