This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 17 Aug 2006, by Ole C Brudvik.
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27 Jul 09
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17 Aug 06
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According to its common, clinical definition, synaesthesia is a condition whereby a person experiences one sensation, e.g. smelling a scent or seeing a color, in regular correspondence with a seemingly unrelated sensation. Moreover, these experiences are physical and real. In his well-known book The Man Who Tasted Shapes, neurologist Richard Cytowic (1993) presents the case of "Michael" who, upon tasting a chicken dish, complained that the chicken did not have "enough points," indicating that the flavor would have been better if it had been pricklier (pp. 3-6).
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As Kress (2003) explains, different modes have different organizing logics, and, as such, different affordances (Gibson, 1979) for meaning-making. For instance, ideas encoded in imagery may be said to offer a different, more spatial and simultaneously apprehended kind of meaning than the same ideas5 encoded in oral language, which presents ideas in a sequentially and temporally organized way. Moreover, Kress goes on to explain, the logics and affordances of different modes also necessarily entail certain “epistemological commitments” on the part of the user:
If I say "a plant cell has a nucleus", I have been forced by the mode to provide a name for the relation between the cell and the nucleus. I have named it as a relation of possession, "have." If I draw the cell, and have been asked to indicate the nucleus, my drawing requires me to place the element that indicates the nucleus somewhere; I cannot avoid that epistemological commitment. (2003, p. 57)
Reflecting upon Kress’s illustration, one might feel that the epistemological peculiarities of each mode, and the weltanschauung structured according to its meaning-making affordances, may seem academic, i.e. without practical ramification. However, the consequences of mode for meaning can indeed be concrete. Tufte (1997) offers one powerful illustration of such a case. He shows how the Challenger space shuttle disaster might have been averted had the involved scientists better understood relations between their intended meanings and their chosen graphic presentation materials when discussing faulty o-rings and the possible danger of explosion (pp. 27-54).
So if, in fact, the quality of meaning of a sign is somehow ineluctably bound to the semiotic mode in which it is made manifest, how is it that coherent meaning is made in a text that is constituted by elements of different modalities that entail respectively different organizing logics and epistemological commitments? This is a question that cuts to the core of the notion of synaesthesia.
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The status of the author in the postmodern world is an uncertain one. Though it seems self-evident that each of us has our own meanings to express, there are those, most notably French semiotician Roland Barthes, who take the notion of authorship to be a mere chimera. Barthes (1977) famously argued that if there ever were such a thing as an author, s/he is presumed "dead." Barthes writes, "a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash" (p. 146). The defining characteristic of Barthes’ (nonexistent) author is the ability to conceive and express original ideas. He does not say that we cannot write, simply that we cannot write anything that is unique to ourselves. This resonates, in large part, with Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of speech genres: stable discourse types, the words of others, which we cannot help but draw upon for our own communication purposes. In an important sense, Barthes may be right. There may well be no new stories, as the saying goes; we do speak and write in re-combinations of the words and ideas of others. However, I believe that we can authentically redesign these or, as Bakhtin optimistically explains, "populate" the utterances of others with our "own intentions" (p. 293).
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I aim (a) to demonstrate practical evidence of the synaesthetic functions of transformation and transduction at work in the multimodal text creation process, (b) to specifically show how the synaesthetic functions of transformation and transduction can actually serve to both facilitate and hinder authorial voice, understood as the purposive expression of personal meaning, in consequential ways, and (c) to point out some possible implications of synaesthesia and multimodal communication for L2 authors in particular.
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As a point of departure, I take Gunther Kress’s (2003) assertion that a theory of multimodal meaning-making must account for the complementary processes of transformation and transduction, which he explains as the purposive reshaping of semiotic resources within and across modes, respectively.
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