Suchergebnisse

A perceptible text-image plane has attracted various studies on intermediality ranging from comparison of literary texts with painting to linguistic analysis of puns and neologisms in advertising. The different media and means of communication indeed seem to share certain aspects that create the crossroad between the two poles so that they are treated more and more as an inseparable whole. This study will concentrate on the common ground of literature and advertising. In literature it is the text that generates a strong visual allusion and in advertising it is mostly the visual aspect that guides the viewer's 'reading'. The intrinsic message of these two media is encoded on a plane where the visual and the textual elements meet. This plane can be analysed in various ways. The focus here will be on two literary phenomena that will prove to be widely exploited in new media: figures of speech and ekphrasis. Figures of speech are foremost known as textual entities with a strong visual character in poetry, prose and other forms of literary texts. For example, metaphor, perhaps the best-known of figures, is a change of word sense achieved by rendering one thing in terms of another, normally incompatible things. Irony is a change of discourse sense (meaning the opposite of what is said); prosopopoeia – an absent person presented as speaking or a dead person as alive. Figures are able to establish an intimate link between objects or phenomena that could not be brought together otherwise. They enable the user to express with strong and sometimes exaggerated imagery ideas and experiences that might seem blunt in simple literal speech. The intrinsic function of figures is, as a matter of fact, to evoke notions and ideas that go beyond the factual denotation or description. The knot between the textual and the visual element can be analysed with the help of ekphrasis. The definition of this literary phenomenon – textual presentation of visual presentation – brings forth a plane where the two features meet and interact. Ekphrasis establishes the link between, e.g. a title and a painting or the text in a comic and the respective panels. In works of art that encompass both a textual and visual dimension ekphrasis is 'automatically' at work. The features might complement one another, or one of them might be dominant. Whatever the case may be, ekphrasis is active at their very intersection and reveals their simultaneous and dynamic interaction. The study will rely on recent magazine advertising. This medium has little space for communication of the respective message and needs to work with means that enable it to express and achieve the wanted effect in several seconds or on merely one page of a magazine. The density of the encoded meaning is what makes it extraordinary. Our analysis will furthermore encompass 20th century theatre. Its realistic portrayal of political and social contexts, on the one hand, and existentialist, on the verge of surrealist, presentation of real-life situations on the other, show its ability to juggle with familiar literary features. Comics will be another art form analysed here. The particularity of the medium is that it works simultaneously with text and image. All of the media analysed here share the common ground of being text-image entities. Throughout the study the emphasis will, however, be on advertising. Analysis should reveal that literary theory has found its way to the new media where literary elements have been given a new way of encoding. The shared features seem to create a new joint sphere for a dynamic interaction of probably the most important means of communication – text and image.