ABSTRACT
In a lucid analysis of the typography of a number of literary texts, van Peer (1993) points to a causal connection between the fl ourishing of literary typographic experimentation and the development of the technologies that enable such experimentation. “New media require new forms for dealing with language and literature,” van Peer argues, and accordingly predicts the likely reverberations of the (at the time) new media, like the computer and other technologies, in the literary output of the near future (van Peer 1993, 59). A quick look at the booksellers’ shelves proves his prediction right. Here we fi nd a multitude of contemporary literary texts that make use of a variety of semiotic modes such as typography, graphics, color, layout, and visual images for their meaning-making. While still predominantly verbal, the explicitly multimodal nature of an increasing number of literary narratives calls for an analytical methodology that accommodates the interplay of different semiotic modes and recognizes the complexity of multimodal narrative meaning, where the signifi cance of visual images, for instance, may well go beyond simple illustration.
