Short description:

Critical Multimodal Studies of Popular Discourse is a ground-breaking collection of interdisciplinary studies that bridge two major traditions in discourse studies: multimodal and critical discourse analysis. Chapters by leading and emerging scholars explore the role that individual semiotic resources and their interaction play in concealing and supporting, or drawing attention to and subverting social boundaries and political or commercial agendas in contemporary popular culture.

Long description:

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.

Table of Contents:

1. From multimodal to critical multimodal studies through popular discourse  Emilia Djonov & Sumin Zhao  Part I: Methodological and theoretical challenges  2. Revisiting cinematic authorship: A multimodal approach  Chiaoi Tseng & John A. Bateman 3. The television title sequence: A visual analysis of Flight of the Conchords  Monika Bednarek  4. The strategic use of the visual mode in advertising metaphors  Charles Forceville  5. Japanese street fashion for young people: A multimodal digital humanities approach for identifying socio-cultural patterns and trends  Alexey Podlasov & Kay L. O?Halloran  Part II: Key issues in contemporary popular culture  6. Multimodal constructions of the nation: How China?s music-entertainment television has incorporated Macau into the national fold  Lauren Gorfinkel  7. A multimodal analysis of the environment beat in a music video  Carmen Daniela Maier & Judith Leah Cross  8. Representations of the institutional ?self? in web-based business news discourse  Sabine Tan  9. Selling the ?indie taste?: A social semiotic analysis of frankie magazine  Sumin Zhao  10. From popularization to marketization: The hypermodal nucleus in institutional science news  Yiqiong Zhang & Kay L. O?Halloran  Part III: New audienceship and authorship in popular discourse  11. Telling a different story: Stance in verbal-visual displays in the news  Dorothy Economou  12. Point of view in picture books and animated film adaptations: Informing critical multimodal comprehension and composition pedagogy  Len Unsworth  13. Points of difference: Intermodal complementarity and social critical literacy in children?s multimodal texts  Angela Thomas  14. Bullet points, new writing, and the marketization of public discourse: A critical multimodal perspective  Emilia Djonov & Theo Van Leeuwen  15. Towards a semiotics of listening  Theo Van Leeuwen