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Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication
Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen New York: Oxford UP, 2001.142 pages. $21.95 (paper). ISBN 0340608773.
Beginning with his work in critical linguistics in the late 1970s, Gunther Kress has influenced a number of scholars in composition studies. The turns in Kress's thinking parallel certain developments in composition theory. In his early critical linguistic analyses, Kress and his collaborators theorized that ideological assumptions could be identified directly in texts, but he later adopted a semiotic approach that includes context and social practice. When Kress moved to the study of images, he and his coauthor, Theo van Leeuwen, began by focusing on visual modality in an effort to identify grammatical rules (Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge, 1996). In their recently published Multimodal Discourse, Kress and van Leeuwen write in the preface that their initial intent was to write a guide to the "languages" of writing, music, images, gestures, and so on, but after several efforts they realized that they needed a metatheory of multimedia and that this theory had to be grounded in communicative practice. The necessity to look to communicative...