There are a few quotes in this piece that I feel follow the
same train of inquiry that we have been touching this summer. I believe that
the first portion of the argument that stood out to me is because it touched on
Professor Downs argument on Thursday. Kress asks “what is it we want to mean,
and what modes and genres are best realized for that meaning?”
In
class we were discussing clarity and how the mode that we use can influence how
the meaning is transmitted and received to the reader (consumer?) of the
message. Kress argues along the same train of thought when she uses the eighth-grade
science class example in a multimodal examination (and might I say: this was severely painful to read). By
comparing and contrasting two different students projects she was able to
explain that within the genre the two girls’ “Scientificness is carried in distinctively
different ways in the two cases” (blah-blah-blah…)
(Kress 47). Finally Kress gets to the point:
“The specificity is the same at
one level: the affordance of the logic of time governs writing, and the
affordance of the logic of space governs the image. Within that there is the
possibility of generic variation. And generic variation of the ensembles, in
each case, provides an overall difference of a significant kind” (47)
So basically, how we place text
and images, even if we have the same material, can affect the overall message
of the piece…? I feel like I am missing the depth of the argument.
She continues her argument of
multimodality when Kress says “In the new communicational world there are now
choices about what is to be represented should be represented: in what mode, in
what genre, in what ensembles of modes and genres, and on what occasions” (49)
These statements are all true, and
it occurs on a daily, and hourly basis b=depending on what industry that you
are working for. I guess the push that I was looking for in Kress’s text didn't
occur until the end, and then I felt as if we were back in class, and Madeline
was saying “can we have anything concrete here?”
Essentially, Kress pushes her
point out to the statement that all genres are mixed genre, but then “what is a
“genre”, a pure genre; how and where does it occur; and how do we recognize it?”
(52)
Well, I am going to put down my
own definitions, and I am teaming up with Merriam-Webster.
Genre
1.
a particular type or category of literature or
art
2.
a category of artistic, musical, or literary
composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content
Now, this is not the exhausted
list of definitions on what a “genre” can be, but I will say that these
definitions are forming my argument/ agreement with Kress that within this
definition of genre, most every item we experience has multimodality. A typical
novel for example, one might say has one mode, the writing, however, it has the
image on the cover (with text), possibly an acknowledgment page, and an
introduction from the author or editor. These are different modes that create
the novel.
I understand your frustration with Kress's shallowness of argument. However, I think the point that is being pushed is how severely placement impacts a text. Especially in a digital form when we read in a "F" pattern. When you assign images to text, it impacts the way it is read. When you don't assign these images at the beginning, the reader has a change to do some imagining. This has the ability to impact a reader at a moral level.
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