ABSTRACT
It is now a truism that communication, and culture more broadly, has become more visual. An assumption that some kind of shift has occurred toward image-centricity is, as a consequence, quite common. This is well reflected both in this volume as a whole, and in the three chapters of the present section, which attempt in particular to deepen the discussion by setting out some theoretical commitments, motivations, and consequences for the study of image-centricity as such. Each of the chapters addresses a rather different area of concern, although all three, to different extents, set out examples of analysis drawing on the aspects of theory they consider. The first chapter, that of Hartmut Stöckl, attempts to extend our understanding of the diversity of genres that, arguably, assign images a central position. The second chapter, that of Nina-Maria Klug, offers a detailed tracing of discursive moves made with respect to culturally prominent news images, suggesting that the core notion of intertextuality must also be extended to include image-like materials. And the third chapter, that of Theo van Leeuwen, focuses on what he has for some time argued to be the new visuality of writing, where written language is considered to crucially involve image-like contributions from several domains, including typography, layout, and more. All three chapters show, in their own ways, the need to extend our understanding of multimodality theoretically, methodologically, and practically, if our accounts of image-centricity are to rise to the challenges that many contemporary communicative artifacts present.
