The Language of War Monuments (Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics) - Hardcover

David Machin; Gill Abousnnouga

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 162356333X ISBN 13: 9781623563332

Publisher: Continuum Publishing Corporation, 2013

Synopsis

This book analyses war monuments by developing a multimodal social-semiotic approach to understand how they communicate as three-dimensional objects. The book provides a practical tool-kit approach to how critical multimodal social semiotics should be done through visual, textual and material analysis. It ties this material analysis into the social and political contexts of production. Using examples across the 20th and 21st century the book's chapters offer a way of analysing the way that monument designers have used specific semiotic choices in terms of things like iconography, objects, shape, form, angularity, height, materials and surface realisation to place representations of war in public places across Britain.

This social-semiotic approach to the study of war monuments serves three innovative purposes. First, it provides a contribution to the work on the ideological representations of war in Media and Cultural Studies and in Critical Discourse Analysis applied specifically to more banal realisations of discourse. Second, it responds to calls by historians for innovative ways to study war commemoration by providing an approach that offers both specific analysis of the objects and attends to matters of design. Thirdly, following in the relatively recent tradition of multimodal analysis, the arguments draw on the ideas of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001), adapting and extending their theories and models to the analysis of British commemorative war monuments, in order to develop a multimodal framework for the analysis of three dimensional objects.

About this title

About the Author

David Machin is Reader in the School of Arts Brunel University, London. His books include Global Media Discourse (2007), Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2007) Analysing Popular Music (2010) and The Language of Crime and Deviance (2012). He is co-editor of the journal Social Semiotics.

Gill Abousnnouga works in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. She has published numerous papers in international peer reviewed journals on war memorials using a multimodal approach.

Edition details

• Publisher: Continuum Publishing Corporation
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 162356333X
• ISBN 13: 9781623563332
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248