Word and Image

Word and image
E301_1 The art of English: literary creativity
Word and image
Page 2 of 101 19th June 2019
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/educational-technology-and-practice/educational-
practice/word-and-image/content-section-0
Word and image
About this free course
This free course provides a sample of Level 3 study in Education,

Childhood & Youth qualifications:
www.open.ac.uk/courses/find/education-childhood-and-youth.
This version of the content may include video, images and

interactive content that may not be optimised for your device.
You can experience this free course as it was originally designed

on OpenLearn, the home of free learning from The Open
University: www.open.edu/openlearn/education/educational-technology-
and-practice/educational-practice/word-and-image/content-section-0.
There you’ll also be able to track your progress via your activity
record, which you can use to demonstrate your learning.
Copyright © 2016 The Open University
Intellectual property
Unless otherwise stated, this resource is released under the terms

of the Creative Commons Licence v4.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en_GB. Within
that The Open University interprets this licence in the following
way: www.open.edu/openlearn/about-openlearn/frequently-asked-
questions-on-openlearn. Copyright and rights falling outside the
terms of the Creative Commons Licence are retained or controlled
Word and image
by The Open University. Please read the full text before using any
of the content.
We believe the primary barrier to accessing high-quality

educational experiences is cost, which is why we aim to publish as
much free content as possible under an open licence. If it proves
difficult to release content under our preferred Creative Commons
licence (e.g. because we can’t afford or gain the clearances or find
suitable alternatives), we will still release the materials for free
under a personal end-user licence.
This is because the learning experience will always be the same

high quality offering and that should always be seen as positive –
even if at times the licensing is different to Creative Commons.
When using the content you must attribute us (The Open

University) (the OU) and any identified author in accordance with
the terms of the Creative Commons Licence.
The Acknowledgements section is used to list, amongst other

things, third party (Proprietary), licensed content which is not
subject to Creative Commons licensing. Proprietary content must
be used (retained) intact and in context to the content at all times.
The Acknowledgements section is also used to bring to your

attention any other Special Restrictions which may apply to the
content. For example there may be times when the Creative
Commons Non-Commercial Sharealike licence does not apply to
Word and image
any of the content even if owned by us (The Open University). In
these instances, unless stated otherwise, the content may be used
for personal and non-commercial use.
We have also identified as Proprietary other material included in

the content which is not subject to Creative Commons
Licence. These are OU logos, trading names and may extend to
certain photographic and video images and sound recordings and
any other material as may be brought to your attention.
Unauthorised use of any of the content may constitute a breach of

the terms and conditions and/or intellectual property laws.
We reserve the right to alter, amend or bring to an end any terms

and conditions provided here without notice.
All rights falling outside the terms of the Creative Commons

licence are retained or controlled by The Open University.
Head of Intellectual Property, The Open University
978-1-4730-1357-5 (.kdl)
978-1-4730-0589-1 (.epub)
Word and image
Contents
 Introduction
 Learning outcomes
 1 Introduction
 2 Semiotics
 2.1 Some semiotic concepts
 2.2 Semiotics and paralanguage in literature
 2.3 Concrete poetry
 2.4 Visual Effects in Poetry
 2.5 She being Brand
 3 Word and image in fiction

 3.1 How visual elements function alongside text
 3.2 Locating the reader in the fictional world
 3.3 Conveying emotion
 3.4 Characterisation and narrative
 3.5 Picturebooks and multimodality
 3.6 Image, words: which mode for which job?
 4 Postmodern multimodal literature
 5 Valuing multimodal texts
 Conclusion
 Keep on learning
Word and image
 References
 Further reading
 Acknowledgements
Word and image
Introduction
This course deals with a range of printed literary texts which use
visual communication as a meaning-making resource. Different
aspects of texts, such as typography and images – and the way
they are combined – will be considered with a view to
understanding how their analysis can illuminate aspects of literary
creativity.
There are examples of creativity in texts which utilise

communicative resources beyond the means of language alone,
such as plays and other performance art, and the translated Alice
in Wonderland which included images made culturally appropriate
to a Catalan reader. Here I look more closely at printed texts to
see what – and how – combinations of word and image
communicate to us as readers. For this, I will be using three
approaches: semiotics, a ‘literary studies’ approach, and a look at
what postmodern theory can illuminate about visual playfulness in
literature.
In this course you will work through the following materials.
Chapter 6 of ‘Word and image’ (allow 7–8 hours).
Reading A: Extracts from 'Signs and myths' by Jonathan Bignell.
Reading B: Extract from 'Narratives of identity and history in settler

colony texts' by Clare Bradford.
Word and image
Reading C: Extracts from 'Postmodernism and the picturebook' by
David Lewis.
‘Visual effects in poetry’ (allow about 45 minutes).
‘she being Brand’ (allow about 30 minutes).
Data collection and analysis: multimodal children's literature

(ongoing).
This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 3 study in

Education, Childhood & Youth qualifications.
Word and image
Learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
 understand how visual and verbal modes of

communication combine in printed texts to produce
meaning(s)
 evaluate how ideas from semiotics, Formalism and
postmodern literary criticism may be used in the
analysis and interpretation of multimodal texts
 understand the significance of shared cultural
knowledge and the way multimodal texts are
interpreted and valued by readers and society.
Word and image
1 Introduction
In this course you will look at ways in which visual aspects add
further layers of meaning to printed literary texts and may be
considered to contribute to their poetic function.
As you read, look out for:
 how multimodal elements can be seen to contribute to

the literariness of texts by foregrounding certain
aspects through deviation and defamiliarisation;
 the application of the theory of semiotics as conceived
by Saussure and developed by Peirce (see Reading A
by Bignell), and how the interpretation of signs and
codes depends upon the social and cultural
knowledge of individual readers;
 the use of visual images with verbal texts in the

creation of fictional reality in both children’s and adult
narratives. (Note that the term ‘high modality’ in this
context refers to the feeling of truth and reality
conveyed and should not be confused with ‘modes’ of
communication or ‘multimodality’);
 the way words and images are used in some children’s

picturebooks to create ‘hybrid’ texts that challenge
and subvert established ideological notions of history.
In Reading B, Bradford analyses two children’s texts
Word and image
to show how they ideologically disrupt dominant
postcolonial perceptions;
 how children’s picturebooks may combine words and

images in distinctly postmodern ways to create
strange and uncertain meanings. See Lewis’
discussion of the features of postmodernity in Reading
C, and the analysis of examples in his reading and in
the main chapter;
 arguments about how and why we make aesthetic

judgements about multimodal texts especially in
relation to their material form and context.
The use of different forms of communication in a single text is

often known as multimodality. I am primarily concerned here with
texts utilising image and words, from the genres of poetry and
narrative. Texts from other genres, such as advertisements, and
texts using other modes of communication, such as movement,
are also included where they seem particularly salient and can be
seen as literary, in the Formalist sense. It is important to look both
at how individual modes can communicate meaning, and at their
interaction in the text – how they can be combined to open up new
possibilities for interpretation. Such combinations and
juxtapositions of modes can be seen to enhance, reinforce or
contradict each other, making meaning unstable and challenging
the reader's attempts to make sense of the text.
Word and image
Multimodality is researched in a range of academic disciplines,
among them linguistics, art history, information technology,
sociology, cultural studies and media studies. Multimodal texts tell
us something about linguistic and artistic creativity, but also about
the social and cultural spheres in which we live, and about
ourselves as producers and consumers of texts. Close analysis
opens up questions about how we make judgements about visual
texts, about how we value or downplay their status. Creative
multimodality also tells us something about how language works –
it may force us to focus on a metaphor or a pun, for example. Or it
may reveal something about how relationships between people
and institutions are represented, or just cause us to reflect on
something we had forgotten to notice for a while.
New technology has brought about a surge in multimodal

creativity, as anyone with a reasonably up-to-date computer can
now produce texts filled with images, sound and movement. But
texts using visuals to make meaning are far from new.
Activity 1: The Mouse's Tale

0 hours 10 minutes
Start by considering the well-known example of ‘The Mouse's Tale’

from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), shown
in Figure 1. First, what is this? A poem, a narrative, a picture?
Word and image
Figure 1 ‘The Mouse's Tale’ (Lewis Carroll, 1865, p. 38).
Think about how the physical shape of the printed text influences
your interpretation. It might be helpful to imagine it laid out
differently. If the text were set out in the usual, left-aligned layout of
prose or some other poems, would you ‘read’ it differently? Why?
View answer - Activity 1: The Mouse's Tale
Word and image
Multimodality forces us as readers to focus on ‘the message for its
own sake’ (Jakobson, 1960, p. 356) and pay fresh attention to
departures from routinised conventions of literature or poetry.
Victor Shklovsky believed that the purpose of art was exactly this –
to counter our habitualised perceptions, to force us to notice:
Habitualisation devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and

the fear of war. ‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on
unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.’ And
art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to
make one feel things, to make the stone stony.
(Shklovsky, 1965, p. 12)
In an analogous way, then, Carroll's poem can be seen as poetic

because it makes the mouse mousy. I will revisit ‘The Mouse's Tale’
later in the course and consider its value as a poem, as well as
looking at other creative texts to draw out their multimodal nature.
First however, it's important to set out a definition of ‘text’ that is
broad enough for the purposes of this course.
A note about text

It will already be clear that to accept non-linguistic textual elements
– such as layout and shape in ‘The Mouse's Tale’ – as meaningful
and communicative, we will need to work with a definition of ‘text’
which will admit these as a valid focus for analysis. A simple and
Word and image
useful definition of ‘text’ for this purpose is the one provided by
August Rubrecht:
A text is …
 any artifact
 produced or modified
 to communicate meaning.
(Rubrecht, 2001)
This definition allows us to consider how meaning can be

conveyed via a range of textual elements, as long as these
elements are meaningful. It is important to differentiate things we
perceive or see, from things we take meaning from:
A piece of driftwood on the beach is not an artifact, just a random

object shaped and placed by natural forces. If a beachcomber
takes it home, paints a face on it, and hangs it on a wall, it turns
into a text communicating the beachcomber's ideas about what is
interesting and beautiful. […] A text is purposeful. A line of
footprints taking the left fork at a junction on a snowy trail is not a
text. An arrow drawn in the snow and pointing left is.
A beautiful sunset is not a text. A painting or photograph of one is.
(Rubrecht, 2001)
Word and image
Later in the course I will return to problematise this definition of
text, as not all texts which make a claim to be meaningful, or ‘art’,
are necessarily interpreted as such. But I turn now to the field of
semiotics and consider what it can offer us when we start to
analyse multimodal texts.
Word and image
2 Semiotics
2.1 Some semiotic concepts
The first Reading in this course outlines some useful terms from
semiotics, which will occur throughout this course. Semiotics is a
well-established approach to the study of language and other
forms of communication which are socially and culturally
meaningful. Its fundamental premise is that we use signs – words
(both spoken and written), images, clothing, gesture – to
communicate meaning. Much of semiotics has its roots in
Formalism, developed in the early twentieth century, which saw
language not just in terms of its constituent parts but in terms of
how its individual elements are related. Formalism focused on the
form and structure of language, the message for its own sake, and
evolved into structuralism in the 1920s and 1930s. A semiotic
framework is applicable to language, images, photographs,
diagrams – any aspect of the text which can be seen to carry
meaning. Semiotics also helps to account for meaning created by
letterforms, typeface and page layout – often highly creative
elements of the text which lie outside what linguists often admit as
‘language’.
Activity 2: Some semiotic concepts (Reading A)

Click on the link below to read ‘Signs and myths’ by Jonathan
Bignell, which first outlines some basic concepts in semiotics:
Word and image
Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of semiology, and Charles
Peirce's theory of semiotics (both theories are now usually
conflated as ‘semiotics’). Bignell then explains some of the main
concepts you will need for the rest of this course.
Signs and myths
View answer - Activity 2: Some semiotic concepts (Reading A)
Activity 3: Signs in an advertisement

0 hours 20 minutes
Take a look at the image shown in Figure 2, ‘Baby McFry’. What

signs seem meaningful to you, and how do you interpret the
image?
Word and image
Figure 2: Baby McFry (Adbusters)
Word and image
View answer - Activity 3: Signs in an advertisement
I now turn to some ways in which semiotic analysis can illuminate

the creative nature of visual elements of literature and poetry. The
remainder of this section looks firstly at visual aspects such as
letterforms, punctuation and layout, and secondly at concrete
poetry. Section 3 broadens out to consider literary works of fiction
which use illustrations and images to convey meaning, although
there will be some overlap between the two sections.
2.2 Semiotics and paralanguage in

literature
Linguists generally define paralanguage as features of language
(particularly of speech) which are combined with words to create
additional meaning, such as intonation, pitch, tempo and tone. In
face-to-face conversation, or in a stage production, visual non-
linguistic features such as gesture, facial expression or movement
may also be included in paralanguage.
It might be assumed that paralinguistic features do not occur in

written texts. But literature and poetry are in fact perfectly capable
of utilising paralinguistic signs, and semiotics gives us a way of
analysing these. Some authors play very creatively with
letterforms, layout of words on the page, and different typefaces to
creative effect, and such play can be highly motivated and
meaningful.
Word and image
Activity 4: Poetry and paralanguage

0 hours 30 minutes
Read the poem below, by e e cummings, about the experience of

driving a new car, and think about:
 how spatial layout is used as a semiotic device;

 how punctuation and case (lower case versus capital
letters) are used to create meaning (as signs);
 how deviations from convention are used creatively.
Do you see any difference between what appears to be denoted,

and connotations that are perhaps not immediately obvious?
she being Brand
-new;and you
know consequently a
little stiff i was
careful of her and(having
thoroughly oiled the universal
Word and image
joint tested my gas felt of
her radiator made sure her springs were O.
K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her
up,slipped the
clutch(and then somehow got into reverse she
kicked what
the hell)next
minute i was back in neutral tried and
again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg. ing (my
lev-er Right-
oh and her gears being in
A 1 shape passed
from low through

Word and image
second-in-to-high like
greasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity
avenue i touched the accelerator and give
her the juice,good
(it
was the first ride and believe i we was
happy to see how nice she acted right up to
the last minute coming back down by the Public
Gardens i slammed on
the
internalexpanding
&
externalcontracting
brakes Bothatonce and

Word and image

brought allof her tremB
-ling
to a:dead.
stand;-
;Still)
(cummings, 1960, p. 15–16)
View answer - Activity 4: Poetry and paralanguage
No two people are likely to have interpreted every element of the

poem by cummings in exactly the same way, nor will everyone
reading this course agree with my points above. I have already
stated that meanings taken from a text vary culturally as well as
individually. This points to a drawback of semiotic analysis, which
is a risk when looking at verbal language but even more salient in
the visual. The connotations of a sign are often multiple and
unstable – as Cook puts it:
Paramount among the techniques for extending denotational

meaning is the exploitation of connotation – the vague association
Word and image
which a word may have for a whole speech community or for
groups or individuals within it. Connotations are both variable and
imprecise. The connotations of ‘dog’ might include such different
qualities as loyalty, dirtiness, inferiority, sexual promiscuity,
friendliness; of ‘stallion’ such qualities as sexual potency, freedom,
nobility.
(Cook, 2001, p. 105)
Semiotics is always influenced by subjective interpretation, so it

must be remembered that like any analytical approach, it cannot
provide answers to everything. Nor can semiotics escape the
critique that it is impressionistic and non-verifiable. But it does give
us a useful ‘way in’ to multimodal texts.
Playfulness with the visual possibilities of letters and words is not a

new phenomenon, of course. I can , , or
, even in this very straightforward (semiotically
speaking) paragraph. These conventions – as well as innumerable
icons and graphic devices for linking visual and verbal text – are
widely exploited in cartoons and comic strips (Goodman, 1996)
and logos and advertisements (Cook, 2001, van Leeuwen, 2005).
They are also detectable in older forms of play with words and
letterforms, such as the rebus – a visual/verbal word game
traditionally written on paper, in which images are combined with
words or morphemes, leaving the reader the task of deciphering
the meaning.
Word and image
In Figure 3, ‘mother’ is realised as a drawing of a moth, alongside
the suffix – er. It is an example from an eighteenth-century
historical document. These days we would be more likely to
encounter the rebus in books of word games or on puzzle websites
(Figure 4).
Figure 3 Rebus in a letter from ‘Brittania to her “daughter” America’ (Darly,

1778).
Word and image
Figure 4 Rebus examples from puzzle websites.
The rebus frequently relies for its effect on a pun across modes.
The visuals have to be read literally and the result transposed into
words for the reader to make any sense of it. We can see a ‘return
to the rebus’ evidenced in text messages on mobile phones, too,
as in ‘CUL8R’ for ‘see you later’.
2.3 Concrete poetry

We looked at ‘The Mouse's Tale’ in the first section of this course.
Concrete poetry (also called ‘pattern poetry’) – where the lines are
arranged in a specific shape on the page in a meaningful way –
has been around for centuries. Mosaics are amongst the earliest
examples of it (see Danet, 2001, pp. 197–202, for some of the
history, and examples of poems). The cummings poem could be
considered concrete, as the spatial layout is significant. The term
‘concrete poetry’ is usually used, however, for poems where the
visual shape is paramount, ‘so that they visually reinforce, or act
as a counterpoint to, the verbal meaning’ (Crystal, 1987, p. 75).
The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) is probably
the most widely known producer of these artforms, which he
entitled Calligrammes. The English poet George Herbert (1593–
1633) also wrote concrete poetry, the best known of which is
‘Easter Wings’, published posthumously in 1633.
Concrete poetry is still very much alive as a literary artform. Figure

5 shows a poem from a more recent source, the NASA website.
Word and image
Start reading at the bottom left of the poem, as the aeroplane is
taking off:
Figure 5 Untitled poem (NASA Quest 2005).
The verses of this poem follow that of the aeroplane, upwards and
rightwards as it lifts into the sky. As well as the iconic shape of the
four text-aeroplanes, the semiotic mode of movement, following
the left-to-right reading path of the English language, is implied.
The NASA poem is fairly traditional in its form, and works just as
well on paper as it does on a computer screen. The advent of
computers, however, has revitalised the form by adding new
modes, particularly sound, colour and movement. An example
using movement is shown in Figure 6, in the series of stills from a
visual poetry website. Dan Waber's ‘argument’ shows a rope
moving from side to side forming the words yes and no, using
movement to realise the visual metaphor of a tug-of-war. At the
time of writing, this poem is available on the internet (at
http://www.vispo.com/guests/DanWaber/argument.html), or you
may be able to find it via a search engine.
Word and image
There are many virtual art galleries displaying poems that make
use of sound, image and text: an internet search of ‘concrete
poetry’ should produce many examples of multimodal artwork on
the web.
We have seen in this section how letterforms, punctuation, and

their playful spatial arrangement can be seen as artful. The
semiotic concepts introduced so far will be revisited, as I now turn
to some multimodal works of fiction which employ these features
and more.
Word and image
Word and image
Figure 6 ‘argument’ (Dan Waber, 1999).
2.4 Visual Effects in Poetry

Featuring: Mark Lawson (presenter), Peter Porter, Tom Paulin, Ian
Macmillan.
In this item from BBC Radio's 4's arts programme Front Row,
broadcast on 28 April 2005, the presenter Mark Lawson talks to
three poets and critics about poetry in which the visual effects on
the page are as important as the sounds and meanings of the
words.
Visual effects in poetry

0 hours 15 minutes
Click below to Listen to audio clip ‘Visual Effects in Poetry’ and

consider what devices are used by the poets mentioned and what
effects they achieve. How does this discussion relate to what you
have read in this chapter?
Audio content is not available in this format.
View transcript - Visual effects in poetry
View answer - Visual effects in poetry
2.5 She being Brand

Word and image
This is a recording, by the actor John Sterland, of e e cummings'
poem which you studied in Section 2.2.
She being Brand

0 hours 30 minutes
Click below to Listen to the reading of this poem and note the
tension between the way it is read and the way it is laid out and
punctuated on the page. Does listening to the reading while you
look at the poem enhance your appreciation of the artistic effects?
Audio content is not available in this format.
she being Brand
View transcript - she being Brand
View answer - She being Brand
Word and image
3 Word and image in fiction

3.1 How visual elements function
alongside text
The rebus is created and enjoyed by both adults and children, but
it is a common assumption in some cultures that while literature
designed for children contains pictures, adult fiction does (or
should) not. This view is not, of course, universal: there is a strong
tradition in France, for example, of the bande dessinée, a comic-style
format for fiction aimed at an adult readership. Here I consider
fictional texts for both child and adult readerships which use
images alongside words. The particular focus will be the creative
juxtaposition of word and image, as this is often crucial to how
readers interpret the text as a whole.
Books for both adults and children have been illustrated (and re-
illustrated for different editions and audiences) for centuries, and
there is a vast literature on the work of illustrators. Some of the
examples in this section are fairly traditional literary works in which
images are used to illustrate the story being told in words (with
illustrations often separated in some way from the verbal text,
printed above or below it, or even as separate plates). In such
texts, the narrative is conveyed in words while the illustrations
have a supporting role, reinforcing the narrative or perhaps
illuminating a salient detail. Others, often more modern texts,
employ paralanguage, images and words – in some cases blurring
Word and image
the boundaries between them to such an extent as to make the
distinctions unidentifiable. These kinds of texts are the subject of
an increasing academic interest in how words and pictures are
used in books, particularly those for children (Nodelman, 1988;
Unsworth and Wheeler, 2002; Watson and Styles, 1996; Arizpe
and Styles, 2003; Nikolajeva and Scott, 2000; Wyile, 2001). In
what follows I show you a small selection, to demonstrate how
visual elements function in the text – what they do and how they
might be seen to ‘mean’.
3.2 Locating the reader in the fictional

world
When we read a narrative, we create a ‘text world’ – described by
Semino (1997, p. 1) as ‘the context, scenario or type of reality that
is evoked in our minds during reading and that (we conclude) is
referred to by the text’. Werth (1999) states that this mental space,
drawn for us by the author, is one which we usually willingly enter
into. When reading, we piece together a mental map from the
description of a location and the way elements are described in
relation to each other. Sometimes, authors draw actual maps for
us. Maps help us to ‘find our feet’ by physically locating the
narrative in an imaginary space; they are a fairly common strategy
in literary texts. The degree to which maps insist to us that ‘this is
where it all happened’ can vary: some maps are very detailed and
complex (and can be vital to the reader in navigating the narrative);
Word and image
others are more lighthearted, such as that of the Hundred Acre
Wood in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh (Figure 7).
Figure 7 ‘Map of 100 Aker Wood’ from Winnie The Pooh (A.A. Milne, 1989;
illustrator E.H. Shepard).
This map is poetic, in Formalist terms, for several reasons. There

is deviation from standard English spelling (piknicks, 100 Aker Wood,
drawn by Me and Mr Shepard helpd) and an absence of apostrophes.
Other renderings of childlike speech and writing are found in floody
place, sandy pit where Roo plays and, of course, heffalumps. The map
also includes an unusual version of the compass. You may be able
to think of other examples of maps in fiction, such as Tolkien's
Word and image
Lord of the Rings, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, C.S. Lewis' ’Narnia’
books and Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song.
Sometimes the illustrations in older books seem to be less

concerned with explanation or elucidation, than with with providing
visual support for the narrative, or perhaps with making a claim to
authenticity. Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown's Schooldays (1949) uses
illustrations in this way. Figure 8 shows an image entitled ‘A few
parting words’ – a phrase that occurs in the verbal text on the
previous page.
Word and image
Figure 8 ‘A few parting words’ (Thomas Hughes, 1949, p. 62–3; illustrator S.
Van Abbé).
The function of this illustration is not to tell us anything new or

explain something unclear from the verbal narrative, but appears
to signify ‘this is what happened, and this is exactly how it
happened’. By showing us, rather than telling us, the author is
appealing to what some see as our inherent trust of the visual (that
‘seeing is believing’). The book is also filled with images of parts of
the British public school, Rugby, which the author attended and
where the story is set (see Figure 9).
Figure 9 Detail of object from a page of Tom Brown's Schooldays (Thomas

Hughes, 1949, p. 188).
One rationale for this use of an image is that the author supposes
readers might be interested to visit the school, which still exists,
and see the artefacts for themselves. But images can also make a
Word and image
claim to truthfulness or reality for the story: if the places and
artefacts are real, then it might be easier to see the story in the
same way. In linguistics this kind of claim to truthfulness would be
termed ‘high modality’ – events or things are represented as if they
were true and real. In semiotic terms, this image denotes a real-life
artefact, but it also connotes ‘truth’, ‘reality’, perhaps ‘honesty’ – it
asks us to accept its authenticity. We could therefore interpret
such images as telling us something about the reliability of the
narrator, or the judgement of a character, depending on what other
information we have to hand as readers.
3.3 Conveying emotion

Other uses of images in fiction seem to function at the level of
connotation rather than denotation: they add affective meaning but
don't seem to have an explicitly narrative function. The Coma, by
Alex Garland (2004), tells the story of a man who is beaten
unconscious on a late-night train, and is hospitalised as a result.
As he describes waking up from his comatose state in the hospital,
talking to the doctors and returning home, it gradually becomes
apparent that he has not recovered at all, but is ‘dreaming’, or at
least only semi-conscious. He remembers very little about himself,
and events are described in a disconnected, ‘other-worldly’ way.
The Coma contains a series of woodcuts (see Figure 10) produced
by the author's father, Nicholas Garland (a political cartoonist for
the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph).
Word and image
Figure 10 Woodcut from The Coma (Garland, 2004).
The woodcuts in this course are instrumental in conveying a sense

of the threatening, alienating world that the narrator inhabits. All
the monochrome images are dark (in every sense); the large black
shapes of the policemen and doctors loom over the man in
hospital, but we never see their faces and nor does the comatose
man. The result is a distancing, an ability only to see outlines and
shadows, which take on the character of vague, unspecified
threats. This is reflected in the story where we learn something of
what is going on inside the man's head. He cannot grasp what has
happened to him, nor whether he is dead or alive, asleep or
awake. In an interview in the British newspaper the Observer, the
Word and image
author Alex Garland commented on the links between the images
and writing in this book:
I think the way [my father] does woodcuts and linocuts very much
influenced the way I write prose. I mean the heavy emphasis on
craft with the aim of making things simple, hopefully deceptively
so.
(Adams, 2004)
The connotations of such images affect us as readers and

influence our reading experience. Their significance can
sometimes be better understood by imagining the image
differently: a different kind of image, perhaps also literally showing
a different visual viewpoint, would produce a different meaning
entirely.
3.4 Characterisation and narrative

Many literary works use images as clues to characterisation. A
good example is found in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time (2003), a book widely read by both adults and
children. Christopher, the central protagonist and narrator, is
fifteen years old and has Asperger's syndrome. He has trouble
understanding what people mean if they depart from the strictly
literal – in particular he finds gestures, facial expressions and
metaphors incomprehensible. In other words, he cannot read the
semiotic codes on the connotative level:
Word and image
I find people confusing. This is for two main reasons.
The first main reason is that people do a lot of talking without using
any words. Siobhan says that if you raise one eyebrow it can mean
lots of different things. It can mean ‘I want to do sex with you’ and
it can also mean ‘I think that what you just said was very stupid.’
[…]
The second main reason is that people often talk using metaphors.
These are examples of metaphors:
I laughed my socks off.
He was the apple of her eye.
They had a skeleton in the cupboard.
We had a real pig of a day.
The dog was stone dead.
The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to

another, and it comes from the Greek words (which means
from one place to another) and (which means to carry) and it is
when you describe something by using a word for something that it
isn't. This means that the word metaphor is a metaphor.
I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and
people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try
Word and image
and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me
because imagining an apple in someone's eye doesn't have
anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget
what the person was talking about.
(Haddon, 2003, pp. 19–20)
Highly intelligent and logical, Christopher documents these

complexities throughout the book and details his rationale for
telling his story in his own way (for example, by using prime
numbers for the chapters of his story, complete with diagrams
showing how prime numbers are identified). As you can see in
Figure 11 below, he illustrates his writing when he feels the need to
explain detail which to most people would seem superfluous, but
which to Christopher is crucial.
Word and image
Figure 11 Christopher's narrative style (Haddon, 2003, pp. 46–7).
In this book, many aspects of Christopher's character are

accessible to the reader through the writing itself, but his
somewhat obsessive attention to detail evidenced by the images
sends the reader a strong message about how he thinks and how
he sees the world. It is possible to see the visuals in The Curious
Incident as ‘closing down’ the range of interpretations potentially
available to the reader, although you may not agree with this. I will
return to this point in Section 5. I now move on to look at texts in
which the images almost assume the role of the narrator.
3.5 Picturebooks and multimodality
Word and image
There are many modern picturebooks where the images assume a
central role in telling the story and creating the central meaning(s)
of the narrative. This is achieved in a variety of ways. Images are
often wholly integrated with the words, and layout, image and
typography are inextricably intertwined. An example of this is
shown in Figure 12, taken from a children's story by Sarah Fanelli,
about a butterfly who lacks the confidence to fly. She travels
around asking the world's flying experts for help – in the extract,
she has partial success in Italy, before leaving for Paris. Among
the many meaningful visual and verbal elements here, you could
consider the following. On the first page:
 the signs which connote Italy and ‘Italianness’: Italian

words (via aerea, farfalla – on Butterfly's purple wing);
the buff-coloured wings with geometric drawings,
reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci's diagrams;
 the layout showing Butterfly taking off towards the right

(like the NASA aeroplane poem, in Figure 5).
On the second page:
 the signs connoting ‘Frenchness’: the red, white and

blue of the French flag; the French words; the Eiffel
Tower;
 the layout of the words, reflecting Butterfly's descent to

the ground in Paris.
Word and image
On both pages, note that Butterfly's body is constructed of
letterforms. A variety of backgrounds are used, most notably the
‘graph paper’ done in blue, perhaps connoting ‘design’ or
‘technology’ to echo the design of her mechanical wings by
Leonardo in Italy.
Word and image
Figure 12: First Flight, Sarah Faneli
Another visual device for narration is the cartoon format. Usually,

cartoons use the left-to-right reading path of English prose
(although this directionality can be violated to particular effect).
Activity 5: The cartoon format as narrative

device
0 hours 30 minutes
Figure 13: Ethel and Ernest, Raymond Briggs
Look at the double page spread taken from Raymond Briggs' story
of the life of his parents, Ethel and Ernest (Figure 14). The book –
written primarily for an adult audience due to its subject matter – is
Word and image
an affectionate narration of the lives of the author's parents, from
their early adulthood in the late 1920s when they met, through the
birth of their son, the trials of living through the Second World War
and their later life. The book ends with their deaths, within a year
of one another, in the early 1970s. As you read, consider the
following questions:
 Why do you think the author chose the cartoon format

for his story?
 What elements of the visual and verbal text seem to
you significant, and why? In other words, what are the
signs and what do they connote?
View answer - Activity 5: The cartoon format as narrative device
3.6 Image, words: which mode for

which job?
I've already mentioned the use of maps in books to help the reader
‘see’ where the action ‘happened’ in order to fully enter into the
narrative and take part in it. It can be worthwhile looking at which
semiotic mode is used for which parts of a narrative, and why this
might be the case.
Nikolajeva and Scott (2000) describe a variety of ways in which

words and pictures can be combined:
[I]n symmetrical interaction, words and pictures tell the same story,
essentially repeating information in different forms of
Word and image
communication. In enhancing interaction, pictures amplify more fully
the meaning of the words, or the words expand the picture so that
different information in the two modes of communication produces
a more complex dynamic. When enhancing interaction becomes
very significant, the dynamic becomes truly complementary.
Dependent on the degree of different information presented, a
counterpointing dynamic may develop where words and images
collaborate to communicate meanings beyond the scope of either
one alone. An extreme form of counterpointing is contradictory
interaction, where words and pictures seem to be in opposition to
one another. This ambiguity challenges the reader to mediate
between the words and pictures to establish a true understanding
of what is being depicted.
(Nikolajeva and Scott, 2000, pp. 225–6)
The next Reading, by Clare Bradford, looks at combinations of

word and image in postcolonial literature. Bradford is a researcher
in children's literature at Deakin University, Australia. She is
concerned here with representations, both linguistic and visual, of
racial politics in children's books, and in this Reading shows how
these social tensions surface in texts from New Zealand and
Canada. She shows how the images, as well as the verbal text,
creatively disrupt expectations, taking traditional narratives and
playing around with them.
Word and image
In the first part of this Reading, Bradford looks at Gavin Bishop's
reworking of a traditional rhyme, ‘The House that Jack Built’. In
case you are not familiar with the rhyme he uses, it makes
extensive use of parallelism, and goes like this:
This is the house that Jack built.
This is the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the rat
That ate the malt
And so on. The last stanza is:
This is the farmer sowing the corn,
That kept the cock that crowed in the morn,
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,

Word and image
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
Bradford then moves on to another text, A Coyote Columbus Story.

Coyote is a mystical creature, part-human, part-canine, who
occurs in many oral folktales around the world, but is particularly
associated with indigenous North American Indians. Coyote is a
devious trickster, not unlike Anansi from African folk tales.
Activity 6: Picturebook politics (Reading B)

Click on the link below to read Clare Bradford's discussion of
postcolonial politics in children's picturebooks, in Reading B.
Clare Bradford's discussion of postcolonial politics in children's

picturebooks
As you read, look out for:
 what Bradford points to as evidence of the instability of

signs;
Word and image
 how the interaction of words and images invites you to
interpret these stories;
 the different connotations of visual signs when stories

are re-told in new contexts for new audiences.
View answer - Activity 6: Picturebook politics (Reading B)
‘The House that Jack Built’ and A Coyote Columbus Story are
examples of texts in which the images carried a large part of the
meaning, and introduced an ideological/politicised spin to the story
represented in words. In Nikolajeva and Scott's terms then, we
could see these texts as examples of a counterpointing dynamic,
where additional meanings are generated by the interaction of
words and images. Further along this cline is their contradictory
interaction, an example of which is shown in Figure 14. It is taken
from Satoshi Kitamura's Lily Takes a Walk (1987), widely cited in
the literature on picturebooks (e.g. Arizpe and Styles, 2003;
Watson and Styles, 1996; Bromley, 2001). Here words and images
struggle hard against each other in the text as they tell their
contradictory stories.
Word and image
Figure 14: Lily takes a walk, Satoshi Kitamura
Lily Takes a Walk tells the story of a little girl, Lily, who takes her
dog Nicky for a walk. The words tell the story from Lily's point of
view and describe where she goes and what she sees on her very
pleasant walk. Nicky's experience is entirely different: he sees
monsters around every corner and threatening faces in the forms
of lamp posts, pillar boxes, and so on. The catalogue of horrors he
experiences is represented entirely in the visual mode. Lily, whose
experience is represented verbally, is oblivious.
Lily Takes a Walk is not, of course, an ‘ideological’ text in the way

that those shown in Reading B were, although it could be
interpreted as rejecting any notion that allowing a young child to
walk the city streets unaccompanied by an adult is potentially
dangerous. Crucial to a semiotic reading of any text is an
understanding of the culture, context and prevailing concerns of
the society in which it was produced, and the purpose and
significance of the text. The importance of this knowledge for
Word and image
interpretation has been demonstrated in the examples so far in this
course, but I want to outline the concept of semiotic domains (Gee,
2003). It provides a useful broadening of semiotics, describing the
kinds of knowledge that readers need to have in order to engage in
all sorts of social practices, including reading. Gee's work has,
generally, an educational focus, but his recognition of the
importance of being able to ‘read’ further than the literal meaning
of words on a page is what makes it useful here.
Semiotic domains
By a semiotic domain I mean any set of practices that recruits one
or more modalities (e.g. oral or written language, images,
equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to
communicate distinctive types of meanings. Here are some
examples of semiotic domains: cellular biology, postmodern
literary criticism, first-person-shooter video games, high-fashion
advertisements, Roman Catholic theology, modernist painting,
midwifery, rap music, wine connoisseurship. [… ]
[Take a sentence] about basketball – “The guard dribbled down

court, held up two fingers, and passed to the open man” – is a
sentence from the semiotic domain of basketball. It might seem
odd to call basketball a semiotic domain. However, in basketball,
particular words, actions, objects, and images take on distinctive
meanings. In basketball, ‘dribble’ does not mean drool; a pick (an
action where an offensive player positions him or herself so as to
block a defensive player guarding one of his or her teammates)
Word and image
means that some defensive player must quickly switch to guard
the now-unguarded offensive player; and the wide circle on each
end of the court means that players who shoot from beyond it get
three points instead of two if they score a basket.
If you don't know these meanings – cannot read these signs – then
you can't ‘read’ (understand) basketball. The matter seems fairly
inconsequential when we are talking about basketball. However, it
quickly seems more consequential when we are talking about the
semiotic domain of some type of science being studied in school.
[… ]
In the modern world, print literacy is not enough. People need to

be literate in a great variety of different semiotic domains. If these
domains involve print, people often need the print bits, of course.
However, the vast majority of domains involve semiotic (symbolic,
representational) resources besides print and some don't involve
print as a resource at all.
(Gee, 2003, pp. 18–19)
As readers or viewers, our recognition of semiotic domains will

vary according to our social and cultural background. In Reading B
we could, for example, identify the semiotic domains of colonial
history and postcolonial resistance to that history, as well as
canonical English children's literature and nursery rhymes. These
domains are particularly salient in the visual mode.
Word and image
The next section in this course continues the focus on sociocultural
aspects of multimodality, and contains the final Reading (Reading
C), on the subject of postmodern literature. I look at some
possibilities for analysing multimodal texts in terms of the wider
literary and social trend of postmodernism, seeing if and how
multimodal texts can be seen to fit within this trend.
Word and image
4 Postmodern multimodal literature

In the next Reading, Lewis starts by outlining some key features of
postmodernity.
Postmodernity and postmodernism are notoriously difficult to

define, but for our purposes here it is enough to understand
postmodernity as a cultural condition (‘the state we find ourselves
in’), of living in an increasingly technologically orientated society,
with lower levels of trust in authority and ‘truth’ than previously,
where the meaning of things is unstable and open to interpretation.
Postmodernism, as it relates to literature, can be understood to
refer to texts that can be seen to represent such instability and
unreliability. A key feature of postmodern texts is the intrusion of
the author. Postmodern texts are often playful, opening up
alternative interpretations for the reader in a variety of creative
ways:
Postmodern literature and art often challenge conventions of

representation, particularly any straightforward notions of unity of
meaning, emphasising instead the possibility of consciously
playing with meaning in any text or art form.
(Swann, et al., 2004, p. 246) The next Reading is about

postmodernism in children's literature.
Activity 7: Postmodernism in fiction (Reading C)
Word and image
Click on the link below to read Reading C, ‘Postmodernism and the
picturebook’, by David Lewis.
Postmodernism and the picturebook
View answer - Activity 7: Postmodernism in fiction (Reading C)
Activity 8: Postmodern picturebooks

0 hours 30 minutes
Look at Figures 15 and 16. They are examples of what could be

termed postmodern picturebooks (Child, 2003; Scieszka and
Smith, 1993). What evidence can you find of the ‘markers’ of
postmodernism that Lewis outlines?
Figure 15: Who's afraid of the big bad book?, Lauren Child
Word and image
Figure 16: Endpaper from The Stinky Cheeseman and Other Fairly Stupid Tales,
Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith
View answer - Activity 8: Postmodern picturebooks
These are just a few preliminary reflections linking the examples to

the points in Lewis’ Reading – you will probably think of many
more questions yourself and link them to issues he raises. The
example in Figure 17 serves to illustrate that adult fiction can also
be playful, and creatively disrespectful of boundaries and
conventions. The endpaper from Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius (2000) shows the author intervening in
the space conventionally reserved for legal and copyright
information. There's a good chance that most readers would
merely glance at this. Unless you were a writer intending to cite
from the book, or had a pressing need for the address of the
Word and image
publisher, you would normally have no reason to look at an
endpaper.
Word and image
Word and image
Figure 17 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers, 2000).
There is a kind of comedy double act going on here, this time with
the visual layout playing the ‘straight man’. The combination of
conventional print size, shape, location and general appearance of
the endpapers – and, of course, the reader's expectations – makes
this look conventional and unexceptional. The joke – the creative
intervention into both the text and our expectations – takes place in
the verbal mode.
More visible traces of postmodernism in adult literature are the

creative uses of typography and layout to signify different voices in
the text. There are many examples of these: one is Mark
Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), which has a different
typeface for each ‘voice’, and different characters intruding on
each other's prose, inserting footnotes, poems, citations,
contradictions and corrections, musical notation and images.
In Reading C, Lewis referred to the ‘flattening out of differences

between high and low’, and postmodernism's tendency towards
hybridisation of styles. This ‘mixing and matching’ can be seen in
many of the texts discussed in this course: rules and conventions
are cheerfully disregarded, the narrator interrupts the reader, and
grammatical rules are violated to creative effect.
I now return briefly to an issue raised in the introduction to this

course, which is how we decide which multimodal texts are
creative, and also how we decide which have ‘literary value’.
Word and image
5 Valuing multimodal texts

In this course I have explored a number of ways of looking at and
analysing multimodal texts. The examples shown can be said to
display creativity or ‘artistry’ in some way, but not all multimodal
texts are necessarily creative, even some of those which can be
analysed as ‘literary’ via Formalism. There are dangers in
assigning the ‘creative’ label to any text purely on the basis of its
visual nature. Multimodal texts are ubiquitous in everyday life
(shop and traffic signs, labels and packaging, telephone
directories). But although these are often analysable in terms of
poetic structures such as deviation or parallelism, some, like dead
metaphors, are now so routinised that they deliver little by way of
illumination of creativity, even if they might be interesting for other
reasons. Not everything that is created is creative, perhaps – some
texts and artefacts are simply ‘made’ or ‘produced’ (Pope, 2005).
So on what basis do we as readers judge multimodal literature as

‘good’ or ‘bad? These are necessarily subjective judgements.
Perhaps we learn to ascribe value to multimodal literary texts
depending on the same (albeit even less specific) notions of ‘good’
and ‘bad’, or ‘high’ and ‘low’. In a sense, then, our aesthetic
judgements depend at least in part on what we have learned to
value in our society and culture. Tenniel's illustrations in Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland, or E.H. Shepard's in Winnie the Pooh, tend
be accorded high value, but it is very difficult to disentangle them
Word and image
from the value accorded to the whole text, both being widely
accepted as part of the canon of English literature. Viewed in
isolation, for example, The Mouse's Tale’ could be said to be quite
superficial in terms of the range of interpretations and layers of
meaning it potentially offers to the reader. It is a successful, quick
pun between visual and verbal modes, but there is no real
complexity in the poem in terms of the relationship between the
actual words used, the overall shape it takes, and the meanings.
Richard Bradford argued that ‘good literature’ is distinguished from
‘bad literature’ by the extent to which form and meaning are held in
balance – a complex interplay that allows a poem to resist closure.
‘The Mouse's Tale’ is fun, but it seems to me that here meaning is
rather unrelated to form, apart from the tale/tail pun. The poem
‘she being Brand’, on the other hand, by e e cummings, can be
seen as having a clearer relationship between typographical form,
and at least two possible interpretations of the meaning of the
poem – a drive in a new car, or a sexual experience. Re-readings
of this poem can easily trigger new associations and semantic
connections: it resists closure, leaving us slightly unsure as to what
is its central topic.
The context in which we encounter a text can also influence the

value we ascribe to it. ‘The Unknown’ is an example of a ‘poem’
constructed – by setting it out in a ‘poem-like’ way – from a political
speech by Donald Rumsfeld, at a US Department of Defense news
briefing in February 2002. It has been taken from the mode of
speech into the mode of writing, and laid out on the page in a way
Word and image
which suggests (visually) ‘this is poetry’. We can of course analyse
it as a poem, even without knowing its provenance, and find that it
‘counts’ as poetry because of its textual features. But one of the
main signifiers in Hart Seely's reappropriation of the words as a
poem is the visual layout. The change from oral to visual mode
enacts a re-evaluation of the text – Seely decided that it ‘counted’
as poetry, set it out as such, and in doing so asks us to accept his
claim.
But the visual appearance of a poem can also lead us to devalue

its worth. Figure 18 is an example that, for me at least, does not
‘count’ as poetry.
This ‘found poem’ is part of a collection of texts encountered at

random by Kenneth Goldsmith, posted up on billboards or taped
onto lamp posts in New York City. There are at least 75 ‘found’
texts on the UbuWeb website, all varying considerably in their style
and purpose. Some are home-made adverts, some are appeals for
information about lost dogs, and so on, and some, like this one,
claim to be poetry. In some respects it succeeds, for me, in its
claim to be a poem – a Formalist analysis would find that it
rhymes, it scans, it has repetition and parallelism. But despite the
claim to be accepted as a poem evidenced in its title (‘Poems For
All’), I find it particularly hard to divorce the words of the poem itself
from the look of it and the fact that it was found in the street. I find
this poem interesting because of its scrawled, handwritten letters
Word and image
(and the erratic mix of lower and upper case), the underlining, and
the tatty paper it is written on.
Figure 18 Poem collected from a public space in New York City (Kenneth
Goldsmith).
Word and image
Materials are imbued with semiotic significance – a hasty,
handwritten note pinned to an office door has a different meaning
to an engraved plaque, even if the words themselves are identical.
We take meaning from texts depending on what they are made of
(pen on notepaper, graffiti on a wall) and on where we encounter
them. ‘The Mouse's Tale’ could mean differently if it were subway
graffiti, or scrawled on a torn piece of notepaper like ‘Poems For
All’. ‘Materiality’ – the stuff that texts are made of – can be seen as
significant in terms of literary value.
Activity 9: Context, material and value

0 hours 10 minutes
Figure 19 shows a poem carved along the length of an underpass

wall at Waterloo station in London. The two photographs are of the
same poem – it starts at the underpass entrance as shown in the
first, then continues down the pedestrian walkway as shown in the
second. Do you accept it as poetry? Would you change your mind
if you found it spray-painted rather than carved, or printed in a
book rather than created on a wall?
Word and image
Figure 19 Verses from ‘Eurydice’ (Sue Hubbard).
View answer - Activity 9: Context, material and value
Word and image
Conclusion
This course has shown some of the many ways in which authors
and illustrators can use visual communication in their work. There
is a huge range of possible signifiers, from non-standard
punctuation (as in the cummings poem), to concrete poetry, to
whole multimodal books where an understanding of the visual
meaning is just as important, if not more so, than the words.
I have introduced different ways of approaching multimodal

literature, from the Formalist or inherency-based to the more
sociocultural. Inevitably, we tend to use a combination of
approaches when faced with a multimodal text, as they provide us
with different tools. Semiotics, for example, relies on an
understanding of social and cultural connotations to find the
meaning of the linguistic or visual sign in the text. Similarly, as
Clare Bradford showed in Reading B, the meanings of individual
signs in the text and their shifting meanings in different cultures are
crucial to understanding the oppositional narrative presented by
writers in postcolonial contexts.
What such texts mean to us as readers is due in no small part to

our previous experience of literary texts and our culture, and to
what we have been taught to value. As with language, visual
elements of a text are often intertextual. These may be allusions to
other visual texts, or deliberate connections made across semiotic
modes such as in punning. In terms of Russian Formalism, writers
Word and image
and illustrators can be seen as creating and re-creating poetic
structures, making the textual world strange and forcing us to
consider it afresh.
I have looked in this course at some texts that use (or ask the
reader to infer) a further semiotic mode – movement.
Word and image
Keep on learning

Study another free course

There are more than 800 courses on OpenLearn for you to choose
from on a range of subjects.
Find out more about all our free courses.

Take your studies further

Find out more about studying with The Open University by visiting
our online prospectus.
If you are new to university study, you may be interested in our

Access Courses or Certificates.

What’s new from OpenLearn?

Sign up to our newsletter or view a sample.

Word and image
For reference, full URLs to pages listed above:
OpenLearn – www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses
Visiting our online prospectus – www.open.ac.uk/courses
Access Courses – www.open.ac.uk/courses/do-it/access
Certificates – www.open.ac.uk/courses/certificates-he
Newsletter – www.open.edu/openlearn/about-openlearn/subscribe-the-
openlearn-newsletter
Word and image
References
Adams, T. (2004) ‘Coma chameleon’, Observer, 27 June, [online],
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1248127,00.ht
ml
Arizpe, E. and Styles, M. (2003) Children Reading Pictures:

interpreting visual texts, London, Routledge.
Asian Dub Foundation (2000) Community Music, London Records.
Bignell, J. (2002) Media Semiotics: An Introduction, Manchester,

Manchester University Press.
Bradford, C. (2001) Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian

children’s literature, Victoria, Melbourne University Press.
Briggs, R. (1998) Ethel and Ernest, London, Jonathan Cape.
Bromley, H. (2001) ‘A question of talk: young children reading

pictures’, Reading, 35(2), pp. 62–6.
Carroll, L. ([1865]1929) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,

Everyman’s Library Children’s Classics, London, David Campbell.
Child, L. (2002) Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book?, London, Hodder.
Cook, G. (2001) The Discourse of Advertising, 2nd edn, London,

Routledge.
Word and image
Crystal, D. (1987) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
cummings, e e (1960) Selected poems 1923–1958, London, Faber

and Faber.
Danet, B. (2001) Cyberpl@y: communicating online, Oxford, Berg.

References 465.
Danielewski, M. (2000) House of Leaves, London, Anchor.
Eggers, D. (2000) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,

London, Picador.
Fanelli, S. (2002) First Flight, London, Jonathan Cape.
Garland, A. (2004) The Coma, London, Faber and Faber. 466 The
Art of English: Literary Creativity
Gee, J.P. (2003) What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning
and Literacy, New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Goldsmith, K. ‘Poems for all’, found poem, UbuWeb, [online] .
Goodman, S. (1996) ‘Visual English’, in S. Goodman and D.

Graddol (eds.) Redesigning Texts: New Texts, New Identities, London,
Routledge.
Haddon, M. (2003) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,

London, Jonathan Cape.
Word and image
Hughes, T. ([1857]1949) Tom Brown’s Schooldays, London, Dent
and Sons.
Jakobson, R. (1960) ‘Closing statement, linguistics and poetics’, in

T. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.
Jakobson, R. (1968) ‘Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry’,

Lingua, 21, pp. 597–609.
Lewis, D. (2001) Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text,

London, Routledge.
Milne, A.A. ([1926]1989) The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh, London,

Chancellor Press/Methuen.
NASA Quest (2005) Untitled poem, Writing Experience: writing

concrete poetry, [online]
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/aero/events/regimes/poet.html.
Nikolajeva, M. and Scott, C. (2000) ‘The dynamics of picturebook

communication’, Children’s Literature in Education, 31(4), pp. 225–
39. 470 The Art of English: Literary Creativity
Nodelman, P. (1988) Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of

Children’s Picture Books, Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press.
Pope, R. (2005) Creativity: Theory, History, Practice, London,

Routledge.
Rubrecht, A. (2001) ‘What is a text?’, Rubrecht on Texts [online] .

Word and image
Rumsfeld, D. (2002) US Department of Defense News Briefing
[online] .
Scieszka, J. and Smith, L. (1992) The Stinky Cheeseman and Other

Fairly Stupid Tales, London, Penguin Books.
Shklovsky, V. (1965) ‘Art as technique’, in L.T. Lemon and M.J.

Reis (eds) Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln, NB,
University of Nebraska Press.
Shklovsky, V. (1965) ‘Art as technique’, in L.T. Lemon and M.J.

Reis (eds) Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln, NB,
University of Nebraska Press.
Smith, Z. (2000) White Teeth, London, Hamish Hamilton.
Swann, J., Deumert, A., Lillis, T. and Mesthrie, R. (2004) A

Dictionary of Sociolinguistics, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University
Press. References 473
Unsworth, L. and Wheeler, J. (2002) ‘Re-valuing the role of images

in reviewing picture books’, Reading: Literacy and Language, 36(2),
pp. 68–74.
van Leeuwen, T. (2005) Introducing Social Semiotics, London,

Routledge.
Waber, D. (1999) ‘argument’, strings, a Flash project, [online]

http://www.vispo.com/guests/DanWaber/argument.html.
Word and image
Watson, V. and Styles, M. (eds) (1996) Talking Pictures: Pictorial
Texts and Young Readers, London, Hodder and Stoughton.
Werth, P. (1999) Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in

Discourse, London, Longman.
Wyile, A.S. (2001) ‘First-person engaging narration in the picture

book: verbal and pictorial variations’, Children’s Literature in
Education, 32(3), pp. 191–202.
Word and image
Further reading
Word and image
Acknowledgements
This free course is an adapted extract from the course E301 The
art of English: literary creativity, which is currently out of
presentation
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and
conditions), this content is made available under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.
The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under

licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful
acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission
to reproduce material in this free course:
Course image: Sharon Drummond in Flickr made available under

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any

have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased
to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
Don't miss out:
If reading this text has inspired you to learn more, you may be
interested in joining the millions of people who discover our free
learning resources and qualifications by visiting The Open
University - www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses
Word and image
Activity 1: The Mouse's Tale

Answer
‘The Mouse's Tale’ is an example of concrete poetry, where words
are arranged on the page in a significant way. When read aloud,
its rhyme and metre are easier to access, but the layout initially
challenges our attempts to read it as a poem. We consider
concrete poetry in more detail in the next section.
‘The Mouse's Tale’ can be considered as literary not only because

it comes from a highly valued and canonical work of literature, but
because it can be analysed in terms of defamiliarisation and
creative deviation in the discussion of Russian Formalism. The
poem is eye-catching (‘made strange’) due to its unusual shape
and can thus be seen as deviating from ‘normal’ layout
conventions of poetry – even though readers of poetry are familiar,
of course, with a range of such conventions. The text is also poetic
in Formalist terms because it contains an obvious pun – in this
case between semiotic modes. The verbal ‘tale’ being told by the
mouse is represented by the visual ‘tail’.
Back to Session 1 Activity 1
Word and image
Activity 2: Some semiotic concepts

(Reading A)
Answer
In semiotics, the basic unit of communication is the sign, which for
Saussure is made up of a signifier (for our purposes here, the
linguistic or visual representation) and a signified (the concept it
represents). Signs are always culturally situated – they mean to
members of a language community or wider society – which is why
Saussure calls them ‘arbitrary’. For Peirce, the sign also comprises
signifier and signified, but he divides signs themselves into three
types. Symbolic signs are those where the signifier does not
resemble the signified – meaning is arbitrary and culturally learnt
and understood (such as the use of the colour red for a Stop sign,
or a linguistic sign – the word ‘cat’ for the animal). Iconic signs are
those where a resemblance can be perceived, such as a portrait of
someone. Indexical signs often have some kind of causal
relationship between signifier and signified: smoke is an index of
fire.
In a moment I will move on to look at how these concepts and

others from Bignell, such as denotation and connotation, may be
applied to word and image in literature, but first we take a look at
how these semiotic ‘nuts and bolts’ can be applied to an
advertisement.
Word and image
Word and image
Activity 3: Signs in an
advertisement
Answer
As a single image, Baby McFry is iconic – a photograph of a
toddler. On the level of denotation, then, we could say it denotes
that particular child, wearing those particular clothes, at the
particular time the photograph was taken. On the connotative level,
though, the image is complex. It is made up of component signs.
Connotations evoked by signs are not universal – different people
may read any image in different ways. Images also require some
interpretative effort on the part of the reader: the more time you
spend looking at them, the more you will probably see. For
example, you may look at Baby McFry and immediately recognise
the McDonald's corporate logo (known as the ‘Golden Arches’, due
to the shape of the letter M). It is one of the best known logos in
the world. You might then decide that the bib and hat are
significant – for you, these may connote pleasure, distaste, or
neither, but quite possibly a feeling you associate with a trip to
McDonald's.
Bignell also discusses codes in his reading, a discussion which

relates to the principle of selection and combination. Signs are
selected from a paradigm – a set of possible signs in a given
category, such as nouns, jackets, colours. Here we have a white
Word and image
(not Asian or Black for example) child (not a man, not an
adolescent, not a grandfather), with a McDonald's bib (not a
different bib), and so on. These are combined along the syntagm –
in a sentence, this would be the linear order of the words, but in an
image it is the spatial arrangement. Because on the paradigmatic
and syntagmatic axes elements have been selected and
combined, it is often illuminating to consider what elements were
not selected, and how a different combination would have changed
the meaning.
All the advertisement actually shows (denotes) is a fairly plump-

looking baby, probably between 12 and 18 months old, wearing a
McDonald's bib and a paper hat with an image of chips printed on
it. So it would be quite possible to read this as an advertisement
for McDonald's itself, or as a children's party invitation, or a family
snap.
But this image is an ‘anti-advertisement’ or ‘subvertisement’

produced by Adbusters, a network of artists and activists
concerned about ecological and commercial issues. They are
known for their anti-consumption campaigns such as Buy Nothing
Day, and TV Turnoff Week, as well as for their parodies of
advertisements by international corporations, such as this one.
This multimodal text condenses into a single image current and
ongoing concerns about the activities of large multinational
corporations, and the amount of contextual information we need to
read it is enormous.
Word and image
McDonald's is a global brand; many people know that it has been
targeted by anti-capitalism activists, who raise concerns about the
environmental damage they believe stems from the production of
‘fast food’; by those who want to replace what have been termed
‘McJobs’ with better long-term career options and pay for young
people; by health professionals concerned with the projected rise
in obesity attributable, in part, to excessive consumption of fast
food; and by those concerned that the global expansion of
McDonald's rides roughshod over local cultural traditions. When
viewing this advertisement, you may or may not have access to all
of this background information. Your interpretation of this spoof
advertisement therefore depends on your recognition (or not) of at
least some of the current controversies, your attitudes towards
them, and perhaps your attitudes to advertising in general. Your
experience of such texts (and indeed any other text) is dependent
also on your cultural context, and social and political factors: you
may be fully aware of the opposition to McDonald's but think it
entirely unreasonable. We return later to this point in Reading B,
where the meanings of the words and images in postcolonial
picturebooks are discussed.
Word and image
Activity 4: Poetry and paralanguage

Answer
There are no right or wrong responses to this activity. You may
have perceived some of the following.
Firstly the overall layout of the poem seems to be highly

connotative. It conveys through its iconic shape the juddering first
minutes of a man trying out his new car The lines are arranged in
short stanzas (apart from the stanza starting it was the first ride,
which I took to be an indication that the car is actually running
smoothly here, just before the brakes are slammed on). Words are
split across both lines and stanzas, which disrupts a smooth
reading and conveys the jerkiness of the driving experience.
The punctuation is, of course, highly non-standard and forces us to

notice it, as it deviates from conventional grammatical functions.
Punctuation here functions to slow us down and speed us up,
interrupting us and jolting us about as we read. In that sense it
puts us in the car to experience the jerky ride for ourselves. Words
in this poem are also compressed into single units by the removal
of spaces, to convey speed and abruptness (such as Bothatonce).
In this way, the poem manages to simulate a third semiotic mode,
movement.
Word and image
A complete analysis would require an understanding of the
contribution to the text's meaning(s) of the visual elements.
Linguistically, we could note the instances of creative rule-breaking
on the grammatical level (believe i we was) and the deliberate
flouting of the rules of English capitalisation and punctuation, for
example. The pronouns (i for the driver, she for the car), as well as
the lexis, also hint at another possible interpretation of this poem –
the driver's fumbling attempts at the seduction of a lover.
Word and image

Answer
The poetry of e e cummings has to be seen on the page to be fully
appreciated. His poetry uses punctuation quite extensively but in a
way that is meaningful visually rather than aurally. This links to the
earlier discussion of paralanguage in poetry and the analysis of
cummings' poem ‘she being Brand’ in the Section 2.2. You may
like to look at that poem again to remind yourself of how it
achieves its effects.
Emily Dickinson was another poet who used punctuation

unconventionally. Tom Paulin points out that her use of dashes
was not due to laziness but because she saw punctuation as a
manifestation of the dominant male culture that she was
determined to resist. We have attached the three examples of
Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Dreams’, for you to compare. The first is
a facsimile of the original manuscript that Dickinson herself wrote.
The second is the version published by Dickinson's niece, Martha
Dickinson Bianchi, in 1935. The final example is the one published
by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955, and shows Johnson's attempt to
reinstate Dickinson’s original punctuation. In comparing the
punctuation and the ‘look’ of these versions of the same poem, we
can seeTom Paulin's point more clearly.
Click below to view Emily Dickinsons "Dreams".

Word and image
Dreams
What is called ‘concrete poetry’ goes much fur ther than merely
using punctuation for visual effects; it actually creates shapes and
pictures from the layout of the verse. You may wish to look again
at the example of Lewis Carroll's ‘The Mouse's Tale’ in Section 1.
The Dadaists used poetry in this way but you can find examples as
far back as the seventeenth century, such as George Herbert’s
poem ‘Easter Wings’.
Click below to view George Herbert's poem "Easter Wings".
Easter Wings
Word and image
She being Brand

Answer
Your reaction will, of course, be personal to you. For me, hearing
the poem read aloud whilst trying to follow it on the page was quite
a shock. It certainly underlined the way the layout and punctuation
makes the poem ‘strange’ in Formalist terms. It made me think
more carefully about the way the language works and the effect on
the meaning of the punctuation and line breaks.
Word and image
Activity 5: The cartoon format as

narrative device
Answer
The multiple signs – and therefore the possible range of
interpretations – are complex. The text uses a fairly conventional
cartoon format in some ways – scenes are depicted in a series of
frames which are read from left to right, speech bubbles are
connected graphically to the speaker or laid out in columns, so that
the reader can attribute one part of the conversation to the man
and the other to the woman. Emphasis and intonation are
conveyed through large, bold type and capitalisation (and of
course exclamation marks and ‘spiky’ speech bubbles). The fact
that this cartoon is so carefully hand-drawn made me wonder if this
has semiotic significance – the care and attention to detail evident
in its production seem to add to the overall meaning of the book,
as a ‘homage’ to the author's parents. The writing, too, seems
genuinely handwritten rather than produced with a computer-
generated cursive font. You may well, in your reading, have found
other details more salient, such as the use of colour, perspective,
and the details of the couple's clothing and car.
Word and image
Activity 6: Picturebook politics

(Reading B)
Answer
Bradford uses terms from semiotics in this Reading, although her
work is probably better located within a literary criticism approach
rather than a semiotic or linguistic one. And although she picks out
for analysis many semiotic signs in the texts, her focus is not
strictly a Formalist one. For Bradford, the sociocultural significance
of what she sees in these stories is at least as important as the
textual elements themselves.
Bradford shows how analysis of visual representation illuminates

the meanings in what appear at first to be simple narratives for
children. The texts encode, through their words and pictures,
conflicting messages and symbolism which convey hybrid,
ambiguous or overtly political messages. Oppositional meanings
are implied in both modes which destabilise the interpretation of
the whole. Such texts are powerful as they call into question
cultural narratives – stories we tell ourselves and each other about
who we are – and can create unease. There are links here with the
notion of ‘hybridity’ (exemplified in relation to Asian Dub
Foundation's rap music and Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, in
Alistair Pennycook's Reading). Maybin and Pearce point to new,
creative, hybrid cultural practices emerging from migration and the
Word and image
resulting mixing of traditions. Clare Bradford's texts provide further
evidence of such texts emerging from postcolonial contexts.
In ‘The House that Jack Built’, signifiers are interpreted by

Bradford as having different connotations in New Zealand than
they did in the original British rhyme. How convincing did you find
her interpretations? Did you agree, for example, that the copybook
page in Figure 2 of the Reader represented the imposition of
English on the Maori people and the ascendancy of literacy over
orality?
The example from Canada, A Coyote Columbus Story, demonstrates

how mockery and cartoon-like parody can be used to undermine
established narratives of colonial heroism. Although the language
clearly pokes fun at Christopher Columbus, it is in the visuals that
the real story takes place and readers are invited to take up a
questioning and oppositional viewpoint to the verbal narrative.
Word and image
Activity 7: Postmodernism in fiction

(Reading C)
Answer
Lewis provides a useful framework for thinking about the links
between trends in sociology and cultural studies, adult literature
and picturebooks. He starts by outlining some of the main aspects
of postmodernity – indeterminacy fragmentation, decanonisation,
irony and hybridisation. These are not, of course, exclusive
properties of postmodern texts: indeterminacy and irony are, for
example, features of many novels and poems. At issue perhaps is
the degree to which such features seem salient to the reader: the
extent to which they invite us to see them as ‘postmodern’. You
may have already considered the idea of the literary canon and the
notion of hybridity, and some of these concepts may be familiar to
you from literary studies. What may be new is Lewis’ analysis of
how these are represented visually in texts for children. Activity 8
then offers some examples of texts (both children's and adult)
which demonstrate his points.
Word and image
Activity 8: Postmodern
picturebooks
Answer
In Figure 15, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book? by Lauren Child, the
main character, Herb, has found himself inadvertently in somebody
else's story. The ‘story’, or what we initially assume to be the
narrator's voice, is on the left (Herb woke with a start …). You may
like to think about the significance of this position on the page, and
whether or not this part of text is on a wall, a blackboard, a
separate book? The girl's speech is printed in capitals and gets
progressively bigger (suggestive of rising tone and volume?). It
emerges at an angle from her mouth, and appears to be so
forceful as to buffet the curtains at the window. Other visual and
typographical pointers are the depiction of Herb's stammering, the
girl's aggressive facial expression and the use of the (similarly
aggressive?) angle of the girl's speech to draw us on to the next
page.
The reader is obliged to interpret the words and pictures as a

whole in this text – indeed it is arguable here whether the words
are not actually more meaningful if interpreted as images. Even
the boxed text on the left carries potential meanings unrelated to
the words themselves, due to its positioning, its difference to the
rest of the page, and its plain background, set apart from the other
Word and image
elements. In postmodern terms, the text is unstable and hybrid,
positioning the reader uncomfortably. The text is polysemous – that
is, open to multiple interpretations. We are left unsure of the
identity of the narrator, our relationship with the shrieking girl, and
even which (whose) story we are reading. It posits a complex
reading position where we have to accept instability and uncertain
meanings as part of the experience.
The second example, Figure 16, is similarly unsettling and equally

fun. Here the narrator explicitly breaks into the story being told by
the Little Red Hen and starts arguing about the proper place in the
book for its non-narrative elements (endpapers, title pages and so
on). This intrusion forces the reader back to reality: we are pulled
back with a jolt from ‘storyland’ into the real world. We are
‘knowing’ in all sorts of ways: we know that books are produced as
commercial and cultural artefacts; we also know that to read a
book is to enter an imaginary world. Here our expectations are
undermined and we have no choice but to play along with this
fragmentation of identity and roles. (Who is the narrator? Jack?
The Little Red Hen? The authors? The reader? All of us?) Texts
such as these make demands on the reader, who is forced to
construct some kind of narrative sense out of a multitude of
possibilities.
Word and image
Activity 9: Context, material and

value
Answer
Like ‘Poems For All’, this is a poem encountered in a public space.
I would accept this as poetry, and accord it literary value. Its
meaning and form seem to connect quite directly with each other,
and with the context of the poem's encounter There are references
such as damp city streets and rush-hour headlights which the weary
commuter passing through the subway would find easy to relate to.
You may well disagree.
Word and image

Transcript
Mark Lawson:
[00:00] It's commonly said that the best way to appreciate poetry is to hear it read
aloud. But that certainly isn't true of this:
Reader:
[00:06] Im, cat, mobile, fall, leaps, float, tumblish, drift, whirl, fully
Mark Lawson:
[00:12] A poem by the American writer e e cummings who, breaking one of the first
rules that all school children learn, never used capital letters for either his initials or
his surname. But big first letters were not the only grammatical convention that
cummings regarded as a capital offence. The poem you just heard sounded relatively
conventional on radio but this is how you would have to read it if dictating to a typist
or printer:
Reader:
[00:35] (im)c-a-t(mo) b,i;l:e FallleA ps!fl OattumblI sh?dr IftwhirlF (Ul)(lY) &&&
Mark Lawson:
[01:08] The cummings poem read to convey look as well as sound. The publication of
a new biography of that anti-grammatical poet who lived from 1894 to 1962
encouraged us to look back at the poets who have played games on the page with
typography and punctuation.
Peter Porter:
[01:23] I think to be fair to cummings the style, the peculiarities of the presentation of
the poems is also I think a proper representation of his personality. Basically what he
wanted people to do I think was to be struck by his poems as not looking like the kind
of poems you're going to see every time you open the pages of a magazine. So it was
an attempt I think not just to get rid of punctuation but to present punctuation as a
stylistic device of appearance rather than a stylistic device of sound or meaning.
Reader:
[01:53] swim so now million many worlds in each least less than particle of perfect
dark---
Peter Porter:
[02:06] They dispense of capital letters, they dispense often of regular punctuation but
there was always some kind of punctuation. After all, Lord Byron, who was supposed
to be a regular poet, punctuated all the time with dashes because he was too idle to put
in the proper punctuation and I think in fact you could pretty well say that the same
thing is true of cummings.
Mark Lawson:
[02:23] The allegation that unconventional punctuation in poetry usually represents
laziness rather than inspiration is satirised in Wendy Cope's poem about an American
writer who liked to let her verse get out of line:
Word and image
Reader:
[02:35] Higgledy-piggledy Emily Dickinson Liked to use dashes Instead of full stops.
Nowadays, faced with such Idiosyncrasy, Critics and editors Send for the cops.
Mark Lawson:
[02:44] Dickinson's main punctuation device was the dash. But, says the poet and
critic Tom Paulin this was not because she was dashing off her thoughts.
Tom Paulin:
[02:53] What you get in Dickinson is the extraordinary puritan vernacular speaking
voice, great intensity, and I think for her punctuation was a symbol of a kind of
patriarchal culture which she spent her life resisting.
Mark Lawson:
[03:12] For a long, long time, it was common for publishers and editors to punctuate
conventionally.
Tom Paulin:
[03:18] That's true. I mean there was the big Johnson edition in 1955, which went
back to the manuscripts and stripped away all the punctuation that had been imposed
on her poems. The same thing happened to John Clare and then over the last twenty or
thirty years all his poems have been published in a huge Oxford edition as they were
in manuscript. He hated punctuation. He said it was like tyranny in government.
Mark Lawson:
[03:45] Punctuation is one way of shaping a poem so that it interests the eye as well
as the ear. But the so-called "concrete" poets went far beyond free grammar and used
the shape of a verse to create what were literally word pictures. The poet Ian
Macmillan:
Ian Macmillan:
[04:00] The Dadaists I believe were big on concrete poetry so you could have the
word "bird" and the word would fly up the page so it would be the shape of a bird.
Peter Porter:
[04:09] If you go back as far as George Herbert in the seventeenth century, he
deliberately wrote poems where there was a witty, metaphorical concept. If he wrote a
poem about Easter Wings then his poems would have extensions like wings.
Ian Macmillan:
[04:23] When I was first reading poetry, I picked up this anthology from a press
called "Second Aeon Press" and it was called Typewriter Poems and there were
poems created on a typewriter and the main man in typewriter poetry, it seemed to
me, was a fellow that I thought was called "Dsh" because he always signed himself
"D S H" and he was actually a monk from Prinknash Abbey called Dom Sylvester
Houédard and his things were amazing because what he mainly made these poems out
of was the dashes and the slashes. And so it became a visual event. And you'd sit
looking at this thing thinking "I'm astonishingly excited by this but what is it? How do
I read it?"
Mark Lawson:
[04:59] From e e cummings to the concrete poets these experiments in presentation
reflect the view that people who are writing a book should remember that it is also
possible to write a look.
Word and image
Back to Session 2 MediaContent 1
Word and image
she being Brand

Transcript
John Sterland:
-she being Brand -new;and you know consequently a little stiff i was careful of her
and(having thoroughly oiled the universal joint tested my gas felt of her radiator made
sure her springs were O. K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her
up,slipped the clutch(and then somehow got into reverse she kicked what the hell)next
minute i was back in neutral tried and again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg. ing(my lev-er
Rightoh and her gears being in A 1 shape passed from low through second-in-to-high
like greasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity avenue i touched the
accelerator and give her the juice,good (it was the first ride and believe i we was
happy to see how nice she acted right up to the last minute coming back down by the
Public Gardens i slammed on the internalexpanding & externalcontracting brakes
Bothatonce and brought allof her tremB -ling to a:dead. stand- ;Still)
Back to Session 2 MediaContent 2

Word and Image

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Word and Image

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Word and Image

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Word and image

E301_1 The art of English: literary creativity

Word and image

Page 2 of 101 19th June 2019

About this free course

This free course provides a sample of Level 3 study in Education,

This version of the content may include video, images and

You can experience this free course as it was originally designed

Copyright © 2016 The Open University

Unless otherwise stated, this resource is released under the terms

Page 3 of 101 19th June 2019

We believe the primary barrier to accessing high-quality

This is because the learning experience will always be the same

When using the content you must attribute us (The Open

The Acknowledgements section is used to list, amongst other

The Acknowledgements section is also used to bring to your

Page 4 of 101 19th June 2019

We have also identified as Proprietary other material included in

Unauthorised use of any of the content may constitute a breach of

We reserve the right to alter, amend or bring to an end any terms

All rights falling outside the terms of the Creative Commons

Head of Intellectual Property, The Open University

Page 5 of 101 19th June 2019

 2.2 Semiotics and paralanguage in literature

 2.3 Concrete poetry

 2.4 Visual Effects in Poetry

 2.5 She being Brand

 3 Word and image in fiction

 3.2 Locating the reader in the fictional world

 3.3 Conveying emotion

 3.4 Characterisation and narrative

 3.5 Picturebooks and multimodality

 3.6 Image, words: which mode for which job?

 4 Postmodern multimodal literature

 5 Valuing multimodal texts

Page 6 of 101 19th June 2019

Page 7 of 101 19th June 2019

There are examples of creativity in texts which utilise

In this course you will work through the following materials.

Chapter 6 of ‘Word and image’ (allow 7–8 hours).

Reading A: Extracts from 'Signs and myths' by Jonathan Bignell.

Reading B: Extract from 'Narratives of identity and history in settler

‘Visual effects in poetry’ (allow about 45 minutes).

‘she being Brand’ (allow about 30 minutes).

Data collection and analysis: multimodal children's literature

This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 3 study in

Page 9 of 101 19th June 2019

 understand how visual and verbal modes of

Page 10 of 101 19th June 2019

As you read, look out for:

 how multimodal elements can be seen to contribute to

 the use of visual images with verbal texts in the

 the way words and images are used in some children’s

 how children’s picturebooks may combine words and

 arguments about how and why we make aesthetic

The use of different forms of communication in a single text is

Page 12 of 101 19th June 2019

New technology has brought about a surge in multimodal

Activity 1: The Mouse's Tale

Start by considering the well-known example of ‘The Mouse's Tale’