I analyze multimodal viewpoint construction in comics to engage with how modalities function within the medium as a specific discourse context with distinct conventions and material qualities. I show how comics employ established storytelling practices with character, narrator, and narrative viewpoint levels, while building up and interweaving these through strategic uses of the modalities of the medium. I mobilize the cognitive theories of embodiment, domains, mental simulation, and mental space blending as an analytical framework. I examine the asynchronicity of viewpoint elements between modalities and their synthesis into composite character viewpoints in several examples. I show how modalities can be prioritized and their different qualities and functions strategically manipulated for viewpoint construal. These brief examples show the complexity inherent in multimodal communication and interpretation and the usefulness of encouraging the medium-specific and interdisciplinary analyses of cultural works from a cognitive linguistic perspective.
Visual poems employ the materiality of language (such as letter- and word-forms and page layouts), to help develop their meanings, thereby synthesizing visual and verbal cues. To discuss this multimodal genre, I posit a framework based on cognitive research of fictive motion, frames, simulation, and blending. I apply this framework to two works by Canadian poet bpNichol to illustrate some of the central cognitive processes and connections required to synthesize and understand them, something previous theoretical positions have struggled with. My analysis illustrates that these apparently simplistic poems are far more complex than we realize. The posited framework can easily extend beyond visual poetry to other multimodal genres, such as comics and advertising, and can also contribute to discussions of genre, style, and other issues of form in literature.
This paper discusses several visual poems that both translate and adapt Bashō's popular frog haiku; such works are theorized here as multimodal transaptations. Bashō's poem blends form and meaning, action and stasis, sound and silence. Traditional translations struggle to incorporate some of these features because of the limitations of the target language. Visual poetry, by drawing on the affordances of print – which includes verbal, visual, and diagrammatic cues – is better equipped to reflect and extend the style and content of Bashō's haiku into the more limited forms of English textuality, while also engaging in the playfulness of the haiku and calligraphic traditions. Produced through a hybrid, multimodal approach, these visual transaptations present the reader with a range of cues that are neither strictly mimetic nor adaptive, and which challenge assumptions about stylistic choices, translation, authorship, and poetic meaning.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.