Search

This study analyses how humour is constructed through multimodal devices in Fullmetal Alchemist (2002-2010, Square Enix). The results of analysis show that comicbook characters' positive and negative emotions can be used as a source of humour via the drawing techniques of super-deformation (i.e., a style of art used to render normally proportioned characters into smaller and cuter forms); symbols (i.e., arbitrary or conventional signs used to represent the invisible); episodisation (i.e., a process of creating a fictional episode); mimetics (i.e., sound-symbolic words); circumfixes (i.e., a class of bound morphemes around a character); suppletion (i.e., an umlaut-style substitute); and symbolic acts (i.e., characters' acts used to portray their emotions and which are symbolic within a certain culture). These drawings techniques are used to portray or exaggerate characters' emotional states. We conclude that the comicbook series analysed involves complex multimodal interactions between text and image, and that characters' various emotional states are perceived as amusing, in the sense that they are associated with human behavioural attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, narratology has undergone considerable interdisciplinary development, broadening its field of investigation beyond the study of verbal language and literary texts alone. Recognising that the linguistic modality is not always and necessarily the only language at work in the narrative is not tantamount to neglecting its specific weight, but it is recognised that narration can take place in different ways. This is the purpose of multimodal analysis. In this respect, our contribution wants to propose applying this perspective to the website the Association des Amis d'Hector Malot, a famous French novelist, where they talk about the author's houses, and whose texts and images, expressing the limits and boundaries, are blurred by the flow of narratives they bring. Indeed, a writer's house is a testimony to the past, an illustrious home, but also the home and discourse of the intimate, where time and space, the imaginations and personal memories of a writer merge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]