Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
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Elisabeth El Refaie
Elisabeth El Refaie (b. 1968) is a senior lecturer at Cardiff University 〈RefaieEE@cardiff.ac.uk〉. Her research interest is in new literacies and visual/multimodal forms of metaphor, narrative, and humor, with a special focus on political cartoons and graphic novels. Her publications include “Visual modality versus authenticity: The example of autobiographical comics” (2010); “Subjective time in David B's graphic memoirEpileptic ” (2010); “The pragmatics of humor reception: Young people's responses to a newspaper cartoon” (2011); and “Of men, mice, and monsters: Body images in David Small'sStitches: A Memoir ” (2012).
Abstract
This article introduces the notion of heterosemiosis to describe the overt juxtaposition of different sign systems in graphic narrative texts. Using Guibert et al.'s (2009) The Photographer as an example, I argue that heterosemiosis is typically signalled through the use of ellipsis, excess, and/or some form of metadiscourse. Heterosemiosis can be used to draw attention to the problematic nature of all representation, thereby disrupting the narrative power of the author(s)/narrator(s) and opening up the possibility of alternative meanings and story interpretations. I also explain why I prefer the new term heterosemiosis to the commonly used notion of “hybridity.”
About the author
Elisabeth El Refaie (b. 1968) is a senior lecturer at Cardiff University 〈RefaieEE@cardiff.ac.uk〉. Her research interest is in new literacies and visual/multimodal forms of metaphor, narrative, and humor, with a special focus on political cartoons and graphic novels. Her publications include “Visual modality versus authenticity: The example of autobiographical comics” (2010); “Subjective time in David B's graphic memoir Epileptic” (2010); “The pragmatics of humor reception: Young people's responses to a newspaper cartoon” (2011); and “Of men, mice, and monsters: Body images in David Small's Stitches: A Memoir” (2012).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
- Minimal acting: On the existential gap between theatre and performance art
- Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
- Dinner is ready! Studying the dynamics and semiotics of dinner
- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
- Minimal acting: On the existential gap between theatre and performance art
- Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
- Dinner is ready! Studying the dynamics and semiotics of dinner
- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
