Text and Image: A Critical Introduction to the Visual/Verbal Divide

Text and image are used together in an increasingly flexible fashion and many disciplines and areas of study are now attempting to understand how these combinations work.This introductory textbook explores and analyses the various approaches to multimodality and offers a broad, interdisciplinary survey of all aspects of the text-image relation. It leads students into detailed discussion concerning a number of approaches that are used. It also brings out their strengths and weaknesses using illustrative example analyses and raises explicit research questions to reinforce learning.

Throughout the book, John Bateman looks at a wide range of perspectives: socio-semiotics, visual communication, psycholinguistic approaches to discourse, rhetorical approaches to advertising and visual persuasion, and cognitive metaphor theory. Applications of the styles of analyses presented are discussed for a variety of materials, including advertisements, picture books, comics and textbooks.

Requiring no prior knowledge of the area, this is an accessible text for all students studying text and image or multimodality within English Language and Linguistics, Media and Communication Studies, Visual and Design Studies.

John A. Bateman is Professor of Appliable English Linguistics at the University of Bremen, Germany and has been teaching courses with significant multimodal components for many years. His publications include Multimodality and Genre (2008), and Multimodal Film Analysis (with Karl-Heinrich Schmidt, 2012)