ABSTRACT

Studies of multimodality have significantly advanced our understanding of the potential of different semiotic resources—verbal, visual, aural, and kinetic—to make meaning and allow people to achieve various social purposes such as persuading, entertaining, and explaining. Yet little is known about the role that individual nonverbal resources and their interaction with language and with each other play in concealing and supporting, or drawing attention to and subverting, social boundaries and inequality, political or commercial agendas. This volume brings together contributions by rominent and emerging scholars that address this gap through the critical analysis of multimodality in popular culture texts and semiotic practices.

It connects multimodal analysis to critical discourse analysis, demonstrating the value of different approaches to multimodality for building a better understanding of critical issues of central interest to discourse analysis, semiotics, applied linguistics, education, cultural and media studies.

part I|76 pages

Methodological and Theoretical Challenges

chapter 2|19 pages

Revisiting Cinematic Authorship

A Multimodal Approach

chapter 3|19 pages

The Television Title Sequence

A Visual Analysis of Flight of the Conchords 1

chapter 5|20 pages

Japanese Street Fashion for Young People

A Multimodal Digital Humanities Approach for Identifying Sociocultural Patterns and Trends

part II|87 pages

Key Issues in Contemporary Popular Culture

chapter 6|16 pages

Multimodal Constructions of the Nation

How China's Music-Entertainment Television Has Incorporated Macau into the National Fold 1

chapter 9|17 pages

Selling the ‘Indie Taste'

A Social Semiotic Analysis of frankie Magazine

chapter 10|18 pages

From Popularization to Marketization

The Hypermodal Nucleus in Institutional Science News

part III|85 pages

New Audienceship and Authorship in Popular Discourse

chapter 11|21 pages

Telling a Different Story

Stance in Verbal-Visual Displays in the News

chapter 12|15 pages

Point of View in Picture Books and Animated Film Adaptations

Informing Critical Multimodal Comprehension and Composition Pedagogy

chapter 13|15 pages

Points of Difference

Intermodal Complementarity and Social Critical Literacy in Children's Multimodal Texts

chapter 14|19 pages

Bullet Points, New Writing, and the Marketization of Public Discourse

A Critical Multimodal Perspective

chapter 15|13 pages

Toward a Semiotics of Listening