NONVERBAL COMPONENT IN GRAPHIC NOVEL “WATCHMEN” BY ALAN MOORE: SEMIOTIC-NARRATIVE INTERPRETATION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/2410-0927-2022-17-6Keywords:
multimodality, nonverbal component, visual literacy, graphic novel, semiotic-narrative interpretationAbstract
The article is concerned with the identification of patterns of non-verbal components in the composition of frames of Alan Moore’s graphic novel “Watchmen”. Modern texts are almost impossible to imagine without the use of visual components. We are increasingly creating and using multimodal texts that use more than one mode to convey information (for example, it can be plain text and images, text and sound). The study of texts is becoming a complex task, where the analysis of visual elements plays as the important role as the analysis of purely textual information. The aim of the article is to study the composition of pages, to establish a possible system of non-verbal components and to derive compositional patterns that are present in Alan Moore’s graphic novel “Watchmen”. The methods of research are narrative and semiotic analyses, which form a complex semiotic-narrative method. The novelty of the study is the attempt to derive rules in the composition of non-verbal visual components of the graphic novel and to explore visual elements from a formal point of view. The derivation of regularities in the use of certain visual forms will help to effectively use these non-verbal resources. Conclusions were made that the composition of the page can be divided into central and polarized according to the information value. The central ones are divided into Circular and Center-Margin Fields. Polarized are divided into Given-New and Ideal-Real. Salience and framing are also important components in the composition. Salience can be enhanced and weakened, and framing indicates the separation or cohesion of elements. An important tool for creating new meanings is the direction of reading. This direction can be linear and non-linear. Non-linear texts, in comparison to linear ones, impose a paradigm, so that a certain structure of the Center and the Margins or the Given and the New is presented, but it is the reader who reserves the right to establish their sequence and connections between them.
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