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Grau & Veigl review JoP by ChF distr version 30-4-13

Filed under: Book reviews. ]]> http://muldisc.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/imagery-in-the-21st-century-book-review/feed/ 0 muldisc http://muldisc.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/rhetorical-devices-in-classroom-films-eef-masson/ http://muldisc.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/rhetorical-devices-in-classroom-films-eef-masson/#comments Sun, 12 May 2013 11:42:35 +0000 muldisc http://muldisc.wordpress.com/?p=848 Continue reading →]]> Rhetorical Devices in Classroom Films

(AIM, 17 May 2013)

Eef Masson (e.l.masson@uva.nl)

 Academic interest in non-theatrical and functional or ‘utility’ films (Hediger and Vonderau 2009) has increased considerably over the past decades. However, the research carried out so far has been somewhat restricted in scope. Studies published since the late 1990s have focused primarily on histories of production and distribution and questions concerning entrepreneurial or pedagogical effectiveness. Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to the films’ textual features: the means they employ in defending their informational, educational or commercial arguments. In the absence of such work, the image survives of very ‘formulaic’ genres, which are thought to make use of a very limited number of (highly recognisable) textual ingredients.

In my paper, I shall challenge this view, and propose an approach to the analysis of these films that helps to foreground their textual diversity. In doing so, I shall use the notion of ‘rhetoric’ which I operationalised in my recent book (Masson 2012). I depart from the assumption that the rhetorical functioning of films is always a matter of somehow incorporating into the text itself the audience addressed. Using some examples from a collection of Dutch classroom films (shorts from the 1940s and 50s), I shall argue that in order for a text’s rhetorical potential – and by extension also a corpus’ rhetorical diversity – to become visible, the interpreter needs to draw inspiration from the very specific viewing situations in which it functioned, and read it in terms of the particular audiences which it addressed.

AIM-meeting 17 May 2013

Assimakis Tseronis (A.Tseronis@uva.nl)

 Since 1996, when Leo Groarke and David Birdsell edited a special issue in the journal Argumentation and Advocacy, entitled “Toward a Theory of Visual Argument”, the interest in what has been customarily called ‘visual argument’ has been growing steadily, despite some early reservations and critiques. But the term ‘argument’ in ‘visual argument’, be it in the discourse of the advocates or in the discourse of the sceptics, invariably seems to be related to the formal concept of argument as product consisting of premises, the acceptability of which is transferred to its conclusion. Moreover, both in the discourse of the advocates of visual argument and in that of the sceptics, a division of labour between the verbal and the visual mode is tacitly acknowledged, whereby the verbal element conveys the standpoint and the visual element the argument(s) in support of it. In this presentation, I argue that this tendency risks restricting the possibilities for analysing the argumentative role of non-verbal elements. Instead, I propose starting from the acknowledgement of the multimodal nature of communication, in which argumentation as a social and rational activity finds its place. In this view, the verbal and non-verbal modes can be studied on an equal footing as to the role they play in contributing directly or indirectly to the various moves that arguers make and the tasks that need to be carried throughout the procedure of critically testing a standpoint. As a result, more functions of visuals (and other non-verbal modes) can be recognised in between the two extremes of a merely ornamental or illustrative role, and the evidentiary one.

On Robots: Visual and Multimodal Metaphor in Science Fiction Film

Science fiction is found across cultures, past and present. From indigenous mythologies to proto-science-fiction tropes in early Arabic literature, such as in the Epic of Gilgamesh or 1001 Arabian Nights, to numerous examples in classical and contemporary film and literature across the globe – sci-fi is a historical genre that uses imaginative worlds for conceptualizing complex issues facing societies. It is also a genre ripe with visually creative contraptions, devices, inventions, and beings.

In looking at a case study of one such creative trope in science fiction film – that of the robot and cyborg – I turn to conceptual metaphor theory as a framework for analysis. While CMT has been the basis of many cognitive linguistic studies, recent research has turned toward the study of visual and multimodal analysis of conceptual metaphor. I thus ask: how does science fiction film use visual and multi-modal metaphor for conceptualizing the issues at its core? And can we trace a conceptual metaphor trend via the visual and multimodal entities, in this case, robots, of science fiction? I present a case study of twenty science fiction films from the 1920s to now to demonstrate and analyze the mechanism of visual and multimodal metaphor of robots in science fiction film.

Yvette Granata researches film and cultural analysis at University of Amsterdam

AIM meeting, 5th Apr 2013.  University of Amsterdam

The figure of speech known as oxymoron is usually defined as an expression involving semantically contradictory or incompatible terms, such as “cold fire” (Shakespeare) and “murderous innocence” (Yeats). Compared to metaphor and metonymy, which have proved to be fundamental to the way humans think, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the oxymoron, most likely because this trope is much rarer in non-poetic discourse. It has been suggested, however, that oxymora, like other tropes, occur not only in the verbal mode but also in the visual. This presentation will discuss some recent enquiries into the nature of the oxymoron and the relation between verbal and visual oxymora. I will argue that the apparent scarcity of visual oxymora is connected to fundamental differences between language and visual representation.

Sune Gregersen

MA programme in Linguistics. University of Copenhagen

FumoKiller

4_Fumo Trappola

3_OffireFumo

Forceville, Charles (2012). “Darwin’s lessons for the humanities.” [review article on the basis of Boyd et al2010, Tomasello 2008, and De Waal 2009)] Unpublished ms. University of Amsterdam, Dept. of Media Studies [http://muldisc.wordpress.com/]

Download: Review.

Mélanie Cravero

10397116

Master’s Film Studies

AIM Research Meeting, February 15^th, 2013

Abstract

Since the development of mass media production, our western society has become more and more exposed to various sources of media content, ranging from classical Art, films, photographs and in the past 50 years, advertisements .In parallel and in relation to the development of strategic modes of visual persuasion, the study of visual rhetoric and more specifically metaphors in print advertising has emerged in the academic field. However, little attention has been paid to minimalist print advertisements and to how visual persuasion unfolds in such purely visual argumentation. In fact, images seem to hold a powerful rhetorical potential when it comes to advertising. It is claimed in this presentation that advertisers not only make use of visual metaphors but also of visual scenario to suggest a rather incongruous proposition.

If we think metaphorically and further attach elaborated meaning to visual propositions, will it be fair to sustain that we think visually? I will herewith examine further the role visual scenario plays in minimalist print advertisements, their ability to affect cognition and further influence attitudes. Eventually, I will present some insights in the field of visual metaphors and expand the study on pictorial metaphors in advertising to the realm of visual imagery, closely linked to cognitive studies. Finally, some limitations and further researches will be discussed.

This presentation surveys the interaction between multimodal metaphor and metonymy through the analysis of two greenwashing advertisements. With the exception of Forceville (1996, 2009a, 2009b), the study of conceptual non-exclusively verbal metaphor and metonymy remains largely unexplored. The theoretical framework combines Ruiz de Mendoza and Díez’s (2002) patterns of interaction between metaphor and metonymy -and their approach to metonymic processes of domain expansion and reduction- with some of Forceville’s (2009a) proposals in multimodality. In addition, I introduce the Multimodal Conceptual Integration Model, a novel theoretical proposal to study interaction among visual, textual, and subsidiarily audial conceptual material. I present a detailed account of (1) a multimodal metonymic composite (a metonymy where one of the terms is rendered in several modes) and (2) a multimodal metaphoric amalgam (a metaphorical complex where a source domain maps onto two different targets, elaborating on Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal 2011, whose domains are cued in different modes). 

KEYWORDS: advertising, metaphoric amalgam, metonymic composite, multimodal metaphor, multimodal metonymy. 
Paula P. Sobrino, University of Logroño, Spain, February 2013

“This book may rightly be called a milestone publication for its ambitious aspirations alone. It seeks to fuse two of the major research paradigms in late 20th and early 21st century social sciences and linguistics, namely the cognitive and the multimodal. Cognitive linguists have argued that metaphor is a matter of thought and conceptual structure, which are only made manifest through language and other semiotic forms of expression. Multimodality research is a late but natural response to the well-known fact that discourse and communication are hardly ever realized in language alone but more often than not through a combination of signing modalities in various media”

Download full review: Visual Communication_2012