Critical Analysis of Visual and Multimodal Texts

This chapter is dedicated to the critical analysis of multimodal texts - i.e., texts that incorporate semiotic resources beyond verbal language. Our focus here is, in particular, on the relationship between the verbal and the visual mode of communication. In a first section, we touch briefly on the ubiquity of multimodality in contemporary society and provide definitions of core concepts. We then continue, in a second section, to systematically develop an argument for the relevance of multimodality within critical disocurse analysis (CDA). The third section summarizes a number of exemplary studies that have adopted a critical approach in multimodal discourse analysis. These studies cover a variety of issues and areas of scholarly inquiry, and therefore aptly demonstrate that multimodal CDA can be applied in various forms. In the fourth section, we introduce - as a practical example - one particular methodological appraoch in more detail, and illustrate its various analytical steps on the basis of two selected multimodal texts. We close with a brief reflection and some concluding remarks.