Narrative and Multimodality: Language, theory, contexts
Symposium of PALA’s Narrative Special Interest Group
27-28 April, 2007, Birmingham, UK.
Structuralist narratology claimed to transcend concerns with media. Alongside this, stylistically-oriented narrative analysis has traditionally privileged spoken and written modes of narrative. Granted, multimodality, or the reliance on more than one semiotic channel for conveying communicative content, is inherent in the face-to-face narrative communication in everyday interaction, where people draw on a range of visual, verbal, paralinguistic,and other cues to make sense of each other. However, the rapid development and increasing use of new media technologies suggest the need to revisit the relations between multimodality and narrative. The purpose of this symposium is to foster further work on multimodality and its impact on narrative production and processing in a variety of storytelling contexts.
Links
- Slides from Sue Thomas' Presentation
- Jess Lacetti's Blog Writeup of the Event Part 1
- Jess Lacetti's Blog Writeup of the Event Part 2
- Ruth Page's Blog Writeup of the Event
Aims
The symposium aims to generate conversation that explores the following questions:
- How does the changing landscape of communication challenge the way we define, understand and use narrative?
- What is the relationship between narrative theory and multimodality?
- How far do classical and postclassical narrative frameworks account for texts that are multimodal or are transformed across media?
- How can methods of narrative analysis help us understand how multimodal narratives function in specific contexts?
- Do the new electronic media afford unprecedented opportunities for multimodality in narrative contexts?
Other topics might include:
- Narrative and transliteracies
- The relationship between cultural context and multimodality
- Diachronic variation in transmedial narrative
- The privileging of particular media (digital, oral, written) in theories of narrative
- Use of new technologies to analyse narrative in different modes
Other Conferences of Interest to Attendees
