Ph.D. Thesis - Multimodal Analysis of Middle English Manuscripts: Examples of Compared Textual and Iconographical Narrations (original) (raw)
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The modernity of Middle-English manuscripts - a multimodal investigation
Elephant & Castle, 2017
This study investigates the interrelation between different semiotic resources in a corpus of sixty Middle English manuscripts dating from 1350 to 1500. The analysis focuses on two main forms of interaction between text and image, namely visual positioning and functionality, and their role in the transmission of meaning. In terms of visual positioning, three main macropatterns have been identified: separateness, inclusion, and integration. As regards functionality, the following patterns emerge: manifest functionality, co-functionality, and apparent unrelation. This study confirms that modern multimodal approaches to text analysis may be fruitfully employed to investigate Middle English manuscripts and their complex iconographic apparatus. Indeed, manuscripts do not represent merely an aesthetic juxtaposition of verses and pictures but a complex and interactive system based on the strategic and creative combination of different multimodal resources.
Images in (Con)Text. Intermedial and Intersemiotic Paradigms of Representation in the Old Media
The rise and constant development of new media have made us more aware of the overwhelming presence of images. This is a striking characteristic of the era that W. J. T. Mitchell referred to as the Pictorial Turn and Gottfried Boehme as Ikonische Wende. Yet the questions of meaning creation and interpretation across media, modalities, and sign systems have not been fully studied and explained in the domain of the old media. The theorisation of mixed media has contributed to reviving scholarly debates on the image-word relation, demonstrating the ideologically loaded discourses that underlie conceptual oppositions such as nature/convention, space/time, iconic/symbolic, epistemic/rhetoric. In light of theoretical reflections on visuality proposed by scholars across different disciplines, this study sets out to frame intermediality and multimodality within the word-image paradigms. In doing so, it seeks to demonstrate that a ‘dialectic of the dialogic reason’, as intermedial and multim...
Message and medium: English Language Practices Across Old and New Media , 2020
Superficially, digital technologies that rely on a keyboard with preset icons to translate characters onto a digitized screen look like extreme divergences from earlier, pre-digital writing practices. Yet, in this paper we argue that contemporary digital writing practices, while adaptive to technological architecture, remediate the practices of specifically medieval manuscript production and consumption. To demonstrate this, we historicize writing and reading practices to argue for the importance of multimodality in communicative situations across time. Taking a transhistorical interdisciplinary approach, we consider the importance of visual rhetoric as both aesthetic and functional components that help readers navigate texts. Visual rhetoric in this sense can be understood as the use of visual imagery to communicate and the processes by which such imagery influences viewers (Foss 2005), drawing on the affordances – the capabilities – of a given mode. Our focus is on continuities in the visual properties of the text, engaging with Bolter and Grusin’s (2000: 14–15) argument that “new media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media”. Although our understanding of exactly how historical readers interacted with and understood texts is limited due to the passage of time, we discuss how such interaction may have operated, based on texts’ visual arrangement, and examine how the affordances of digital multimodality mirror, and in a sense recover, the same fluid, contingent and participatory textual experience of their medieval predecessors.
Rethinking the Dialogue between the Verbal and the Visual, 2023
Intermediality, figurability, iconotext, visual exegesis: these are some of the many new ways in which the relationship between text and image has been explored in recent decades. Scholars have benefited from theoretical work in the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics, alongside more traditional fields such as literature, art history and cultural history. Focusing on religious texts and images between 1400 and 1700, the essays gathered in this volume contribute to these developments by grounding their case studies in methodology. In considering various relations between the visual and the verbal, the editors have adopted the broadest position possible, emphasizing the phenomenological point of view from which the objects under discussion are examined. Contributors to this volume: Ralph Dekoninck, Anna Dlabačová, Grégory Ems, Ingrid Falque, Agnès Guiderdoni, Walter S. Melion, Kees Schepers, Paul J. Smith, and Elliott D. Wise.
This paper looks onto the relation between the visual embedded in narrative technique (text) and the textual embedded in visual technique (image). In doing so, I am illustrating the interplay between text and imagery integrated not in one and the same artwork, but in a spatial – service unity, thereby suggesting a conscious relation between an artist and a priest-preacher in a church or a monastery. My thesis is that complementarity and interdependency between text and image can exist even beyond the boundaries of a single artwork. As an entry point to this discussion, building up on previous work, I am using the Tenth Homily “On Future Judgement” by Nektarios Terpos and the scene of the Last Judgement primarily from the narthex of the catholicon of Ardenica Monastery, but also from other churches in Myzeqe region, central Albania.
This was a hard paper to write: 1000 years of 'word and image' in one article. It takes a selection of interesting case studies (from Bede, the Pillar of Eliseg, Christina of Markyate's Psalter, the Elinor Crosses) to make some observations on the way in which word-text and image-text work might have worked together for a medieval audience.
The Case of Rebellion: Researching Multimodal Texts
2008
rebellion is a computer game created by a 14-year-old boy. Because it affords insights into how multimodal texts are designed (and games are perhaps the most multimodal of texts), I will use it as an instance of how to approach the analysis of such texts. For me, the most important theoretical and methodological opportunities and problems of social semiotics and multimodality theory are rooted in a claim made by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1992) in a paper critiquing the work of the later Barthes (1978). In it, they made the claim that social semiotics is “the theoretical, analytical and descriptive branch of cultural studies” (pp. xx–xx). What might this claim mean? My reading is that it indicates a desire to operate with the theories of culture emanating originally from the work of pioneers such as Williams (1961), and subsequently from the tradition of cultural studies. It relates this tradition to a theory of textual analysis rooted in the cultural and social function of the text, de...