Kategorie: IMAGE 22/2015

von Elisabeth Birk und Mark Halawa

By Jakob Krebs | Literal literacy can be used as a vantage point for the reconstruction of intricate relations between three further kinds of literacy. Pictorial literacy can be contrasted with literal literacy at least in phenomenological and epistemological regards. This contrast helps to separate different modes of representation as issues of information literacy. Information literacy relies on a productive concurrence of different types of literacies, while visual literacy is neither restricted to the search for information nor to pictorial signs.

Von Andreas Osterroth | Das Ziel des vorliegenden Beitrages ist die Vorstellung verschiedener Möglichkeiten, Internet-Memes aus linguistischer Sicht zu betrachten. Hierfür ist ein kurzer Überblick über die Bildlinguistik nötig und der sogenannte pictorial turn muss bewertet werden. Ausdrücke verschiedener führender Linguisten, wie Sprache-Bild-Text, Sehflächen und andere, müssen vor der Analyse betrachtet werden.

Von Andreas Josef Vater | The bible-compilation Geistliche Herzens-Einbildungen in zweihundertund-fünfzig biblischen Figur-Sprüchen angedeutet was first published by Melchior Mattsperger in 1684. The work’s most notable feature are figures substituting words. Today they are mainly considered as an educational instrument for children to improve their language- and reading-skills. In my paper I am questioning this point of view by taking a closer look at the figures and by investigating the reasons for such a misguided interpretation. I will demonstrate that Mattsperger’s book was originally intended as an intellectual game. Furthermore, I will argue that such a reevaluation requires a fundamental shift in the so far one-sided linguistical perception of figures of substitution.

By Axel Roderich Werner | According to art historian James Elkins, the very term of ›visual literacy‹ is to be assessed as an at least »slightly dubious expression« (ELKINS 2008: 8) if not, in its linking of the scriptural to the pictorial or the discoursive to the non-discoursive, as an outright »self-defeating paradox« (ELKINS 2008: 5). In much of the same sense, William Mitchell views this arguably problematic though historically quite successful term as »a strong and seemingly unavoidable metaphor« (MITCHELL 2008a: 11) in which, though not mutually exclusive, the term of ›reading‹ serving as the vehicle and the term of ›vision‹ as the tenor thus are establishing a kind of hierarchy by apparently privileging the former over the latter in a kind of catachresis (in which the metaphor fills the gap of the lack of a literal or ›proper‹ designation)—literacy explains visuality just as texts explain pictures. […]

By Sascha Demarmels, Ursula Stalder und Sonja Kolberg | Storytelling as a means to raise the motivation of recipients to process information and to support the comprehension of marketing texts written for products that are in need of an explanation. Recent studies on marketing for sustainable energy products have shown that comprehensibility for complex goods often fails because of the low motivation of the recipients to read and process information. We therefore ask how texts have to be shaped in order to reach consumers. Today ›texts‹ are no longer considered to consist only of verbal material but of different codes—they are multimodal. The question is, then, how to increase motivation by enacting the content, by ›staging it‹. Dual processing theories and the strategy of storytelling may prove to be helpful, as some outstanding examples in current marketing practice for sustainable energy have shown.

By Kathryn M. Hudson and John S. Henderson | Orthodox analytical approaches to analyses of Maya stelae—monuments that celebrate Maya kings visually and in hieroglyphic texts (see fig. 1)—proceed as though each contains two distinct and only vaguely related elements: the text and the accompanying imagery. These features are most often conceptualized, analyzed, and interpreted separately in a methodological framework that has created a widely shared perspective in which text and context have become thoroughly divorced from each other but reified as distinct constituent elements. […]