Mixed messages : American correspondences in visual and verbal practices
- Submitting institution
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The University of East Anglia
- Unit of assessment
- 25 - Area Studies
- Output identifier
- 182632592
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- ISBN
- 978-1-5261-0180-8
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The editing and writing of Mixed Messages required an extended methodological investigation across disciplines. Its wide-ranging interdisciplinary framework synthesizes literary and aesthetic close reading methods with research from embodied cognition and cognitive linguistics in order to present a unified theory of how blended word and image forms make meaning. The Introduction and Envoi lay this methodology out in linked in-depth and interdisciplinary research projects whilst the collection’s analysis across modern American word and image forms, marshals and illuminates an extensive and significant body of material. A previously unexplored American intellectual context provides both this methodology’s inspiration and its testing ground.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This collection sought answers to three pressing problems in word and image studies. Firstly, the field was Euro-centric; before Mixed Messages there was no sustained work on these American texts in a distinctly American intellectual tradition. Secondly, the tendency in word and image criticism was to either unsatisfactorily apply image analysis methods to literary texts (often without interrogation of the very notion of ‘imagery’) or to apply semiotic methods to art. Neither methodology considered the works fully integrated; both were dogged by unhelpful disciplinary boundary debates. Thirdly, there was very little extant in the way of a systemic investigation into how the ‘mixed messages’ of word-and-image texts made meaning.
Gander and I encouraged and selected contributions from authors who also asked these larger questions and who covered a wide range of word and image forms. Our answers are foundational – they challenge the very notion of the separation of image and text, arguing for an embeddedness of writing and art in the body which places these blended forms in a rich pragmatic and cognitive linguistic context.
Decisions about this framework were undertaken by Gander and I in concert. We jointly guided contributors to this intellectual end through detailed comments on multiple revisions. My sole authored chapter is as a result of additional research and writing I undertook alone; Gander and I edited each other’s chapters. The introduction and Envoi, co-written by Gander and I, are substantial original pieces of research intended to synthesise and lay out our methodology. We both read primary sources, developed the theorisation in conversation, and alternated working on iterations.
Mixed Messages should be considered as one integrated output which is developed across contributor chapters on different imagetext forms to advance a specifically American intellectual tradition, and to offer a new integrated interdisciplinary methodology.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
