This volume explores the relationship between aesthetics and traditional multimodal communication to show how all semiotic resources, not just those situated within fine arts, have an aesthetic function. Bringing together contributions from an interdisciplinary group of researchers, the book meditates on the role of aesthetics in a broader range of semiotic resources, including urban spaces, blogs, digital scrapbooks, children’s literature, music, and online learning environments. The result is a comprehensive collection of new perspectives on how communication and aesthetics enrich and complement one another when meaning is made with semiotic resources, making this key reading for students and scholars in multimodality, fine arts, education studies, and visual culture.

The book outlines experimental style research in aesthetics and multimodality research. It focuses on human cognitive and perceptual processes connected with style. On this basis, a common theoretical basis for style in literature, art, architecture, and design is proposed. - neuroaesthetics; stylistics; linguistics; cognition; art; design

What are the implications of comics for law? Tackling this question, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics explores the epistemological dimensions of comics and the way this once-maligned medium can help think about – and reshape – the form of law. Traversing comics, critical, and cultural legal studies, it seeks to enrich the theorisation of comics with a critical aesthetics that expands its value and significance for law, as well as knowledge more generally. It argues that comics’ multimodality – its hybrid structure, which represents a meeting point of text, image, reason, and aesthetics – opens understanding of the limits of law’s rational texts by shifting between multiple frames and modes of presentation. Comics thereby exposes the way all forms of knowledge are shaped out of an unstructured universe, becoming a mask over this chaotic ‘beyond’. This mask of knowing remains haunted – by that which it can never fully capture or represent. Comics thus models knowledge as an infinity of nested frames haunted by the chaos without structure. In such a model, the multiple aspects of law become one region of a vast and bottomless cascade of perspectives – an infinite multiframe that extends far beyond the traditional confines of the comics page, rendering law boundless.

Multimodality in Writing attempts to generate and apply new theories, disciplines and methods to account for semiotic processes in texts and during text production. It thus showcases new directions in multimodal research and theorizing writing practices from a multimodal perspective. It explores texts, producers of texts, and readers of texts. It also focuses on teaching multimodal text production and writing pedagogy from different domains and disciplines, such as rhetoric and writing composition, architecture, mathematics, film-making, science and the newsroom. Multimodality in Writing explores the kinds of methodological approaches that can augment social semiotic approaches to analyzing and teaching writing, including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, ethnographic approaches, and genre pedagogy. Much of the research shows how the regularities of modes and interest of sign makers are socially shaped to realize convention. Because of this, the approaches are strongly underpinned by social and cultural theories of representation and communication.

A groundbreaking collection of essays looking at the concepts of 'intermediality' and 'multimodality' - the relationship between various forms of art and new media - and including case studies ranging from music, film and architecture to medieval ballads, biopoetry and Lettrism.

Translation and Multimodality: Beyond Words is one of the first books to explore how translation needs to be redefined and reconfigured in contexts where multiple modes of communication, such as writing, images, gesture, and music, occur simultaneously. Bringing together world-leading experts in translation theory and multimodality, each chapter explores important interconnections among these related, yet distinct, disciplines. As communication becomes ever more multimodal, the need to consider translation in multimodal contexts is increasingly vital. The various forms of meaning-making that have become prominent in the twenty-first century are already destabilising certain time-honoured translation-theoretic paradigms, causing old definitions and assumptions to appear inadequate. This ground-breaking volume explores these important issues in relation to multimodal translation with examples from literature, dance, music, TV, film, and the visual arts. Encouraging a greater convergence between these two significant disciplines, this text is essential for advanced students and researchers in Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Communication Studies.

This book engages with visual and multimodal devices in twenty-first century literature, exploring canonical authors like Mark Z. Danielewski and Jonathan Safran Foer alongside experimental fringe writers such as Steve Tomasula, to uncover an embodied textual aesthetics in the information age. Bringing together multimodality and cognition in an innovative study of how readers engage with challenging literature, this book makes a significant contribution to the debates surrounding multimodal design and multimodal reading.