Volume 5, Issue 1 -

Researchers seeking to analyse how intersubjectivity is established and maintained face significant challenges. The purpose of this article is to provide theoretical/methodological tools that begin to address these challenges. I develop these tools by applying several concepts from multimodal (inter)action analysis to an excerpt taken from the beginning of a tutoring session, drawn from a wider data set of nine one-to-one tutoring sessions. Focusing on co-produced higher-level actions as an analytic site of intersubjectivity, I show that lower-level actions that co-constitute a higher-level action can be delineated into tiers of materiality. I identify three tiers of materiality: durable, adjustable and fleeting. I introduce the theoretical/methodological tool tiers of material intersubjectivity to delineate these tiers analytically from empirical data, and show how these tiers identify a multimodal basis of material intersubjectivity. Building on this analysis I argue that the durable and adjustable tiers of material intersubjectivity produce the interactive substrate , which must be established in order for actions that display fleeting materiality to produce intersubjectivity. These theoretical/methodological tools extend the framework of multimodal (inter)action analysis, and I consider some potential applications beyond the example used here.

Quirk Books, the publisher of Grady Hendrix’s (2014, Horrorstör. Philadelphia: Quirk Books) Horrorstör, portray the novel on their website as “a traditional haunted house story” but also mention that it “comes conveniently packaged in the form of a retail catalog”. Such description points to two generic foundations: the horror novel, which is manifested primarily through the novel’s literary themes and linguistic style, and the retail catalogue, signalled chiefly through the novel’s multimodal design features. In this paper I argue that in order to account for Horrorstör both as literary experience and as “sly social commentary” (as Quirk books claim), consideration and analysis of genre is vital. The paper subsequently offers a cognitive stylistic approach to multimodal literary genre analysis. In doing so, it presents a reading of the novel as a literary artefact: as fiction and as commodity.

The purpose of this essay is to address the multimodal nature of Matt Kish’s project Every Page of Moby-Dick, Illustrated , where Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece is set as paratext. Particular focus is set on the portrayals of Captain Achab, specifically “Page 153”, “Page 465” and “Page 469”. The basic theoretical framework has been offered by Alice Gibbons’ theorization of multimodal cognitive poetics and Sigrid Norris’ systematization of multimodal (inter)action. Useful insight has been lent by Sharon Cameron’s work on allegories of the body in Melville’s writing. The given analysis aims to pinpoint the elements of innovation in Kish’s work with respect to the canonical formal features of illustrated book and renewing of literary classics in multimodal terms.

The digital revolution has led to the increasing hybridization of American political discourse with the language and the formats of the web, giving rise to a public/private narration where many communication codes merge and where different discursive voices are interwoven. Through the study of a qualitative dataset of messages posted on the “Timeline” section of the White House’s Facebook profile, the paper aims at examining the multimodal meaning-making strategies chosen to encode official messages with a special focus on the combination of words and images. More in detail, adopting a Critical Multimodal perspective (Machin and Mayr 2012; van Leeuwen 2013), the analysis will investigate the stance (Biber and Conrad 2000; Martin and White 2005) of the digitally remediated institutional voice (Askehave and Ellerup Nielsen 2005; Eisenlauer 2013) in order to explore whether such stance and its related textual practices are influenced by the postmodern, libertarian and play-oriented attitude typical of the so-called ‘hacker/geek’ culture (Coleman 2013; Konzack 2006).

Humor is present in most instances of human to human interaction and has often been studied by discourse analysis (Long and Graesser 2009). These studies have taken several perspectives but have often ignored the multimodal aspect of humor even more if the genres selected have been in oral academic discourse. In this paper we focus on a genre that has rarely been studied, the conference plenary lecture. Taking as a theoretical model Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) we look at the semiotic resources employed by two senior researchers: one Spanish, Dr. Jose Manuel Blecua and one British, Dr David Crystal. They were plenary speakers in two different conferences. In their speeches Dr. Blecua dealt with Spanish as a Foreign language and Dr. Crystal with English as a Foreign language. Although there does not seem to have been any point of contact between them, their lectures show a number of similarities especially with regard to the semiotic resources they use in order to produce humor.