Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows that strategy and ambiguity are in exciting relationships: sometimes funny, frequently complex, and never the same. It begins with three examples that help to substantiate this claim and to understand the ways in which ambiguity may be strategic and in which the strategic use of language may involve ambiguity. The book focuses on two historically distant combinations of written and pictorial elements and their respective strategies directed at the achievement of persuasive effects: a 1646 version of the Dance of Death and a 2014 advertising campaign by the Leo Burnett agency. The ambiguity resulting from the interplay of different levels of representation is an example of the close proximity between means and ends in literary strategies, because the ambivalence triggered in the audience is cognate with the ambiguity from which it results.