A Critique of Mahmoud Fotouhi's Image Rhetoric

Since traditional rhetoric is not an answer to the study of many images of modern poetry, including the images of symbolist poets and their dependents on abstract images, new foundations must be laid by which the beauty of these works can be analyzed. Mahmoud Fotouhi’s book Image Rhetoric, by separating the images related to each literary school, including classicism, romanticism, symbolism, myth, and image, has explained specific visual principles and functions for each of them. By means of those principles and image characteristics that he presents about each school, the poetry of the poets of the mentioned schools can be examined and analyzed. In this research, the Image Rhetoric book of Mahmoud Fotouhi has been critically examined. Since the problems of the book in question are numerous and do not have any structural or thematic similarities, the authors refrained from categorizing the problems and indicated the pages of each case with a separate number. The results show that the book has 10 problems. The most important problems are the contradictions and inconsistencies of the author’s view about general attitude, examples of unimagined poetry, and the belief in meaninglessness.