ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to widen perspectives and research approaches on intratextual practices in image-centric communication to produce a trans-textual view that is closely linked to the concepts of discourse and intertextuality. The aim is to demonstrate that an image can constitute the nucleus of an entire discourse, here understood as a transtextual semantic unit. The hypothesis that a discourse can unfold in an image-centric fashion is validated by the fact that images are often located at the center of a dense network of intertextual references. This chapter provides an analytical framework and a typology of major ways in which such intertextual references to a nuclear/centric image can be established in discourse. It is based on a case study of images that went around the world: the photos of the dead refugee boy Aylan Kurdi at a beach in Bodrum, taken by the Turkish photographer Nilüfer Demir in September 2015.
