ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the process and nature of interpretation in literature, film and the displayed visual art of painting. Running through all of them is a search for methods of analysis which can be shared by students, other researchers and ordinary readers and viewers. The book articulates a theoretically based and consistent method of analysis relating artistic texts in three different modalities. It argues for a coherent and consistent process of interpretation, linking pre-existing knowledge and attitudes in the reader/viewer with patterns discovered in the process of detailed analysis. The whole collection stresses the centrality of artistic texts in the study of multimodality. The German literary theorists Hans-Georg Gadamer and Wilhelm Dilthey drew on a tradition of biblical scholarship which related linguistic detail in a text to overall meanings discovered in the process of interpretation: "Hermeneutics.".
