FFLIS Distinguished Lecture Series, 26 Sept.

Last updated:2014-09-18

Topic: ‘The Drover’s Wife’ – semiotic spanning between a story and a painting – an exercise in multisystemiotics
Speaker: Professor/Dr. Eija Maritta Ventola, Professor of Business Communication, Aalto University, Finland

Time: 16:20, Friday, September 26, 2014
Venue: Room 210, School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou)

Organizer: Faculty of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Sun Yat-sen Unviersity


Abstract: This paper deals with multisystemiotics and semiotic spanning between various forms of art – in this case the stories and the paintings. The initial point for the discussion is Murray Bail’s short story The Drover's Wife. The title of the short story also refers to Henry Lawson’s story and to a painting by Russell Drysdale. The focus of the presentation is on the meanings that the painters and the writers realize with their modes of expression and how the meanings they create are interlinked and how they make sense to the consumers – the viewers, the readers and to critics and students of these works. The paper explores the grammar of the painting and its meanings and how Murray Bail links his work with the painting and construes his meanings in a story. The paper is an exploration in systems beyond intertextuality – it explores semiotic spanning and is an exercise in developing tools for multisystemiotic analysis useful for linguists, semioticians, students … anyone interested in understanding how multimodal discourses are made to ‘tick’.

Biography: Eija Ventola, Professor, a member of Academia Scientiarum Fennica, teaches Business and Corporate Communication at Aalto University, School of Business. She has previously held teaching, research, administrative and chair positions at various universities in Australia, Finland, Great Britain, Germany, Austria and guest professorships in the USA, Spain, Brazil, and Australia. She is a popular speaker at international conferences and workshops. She publishes many articles and books, including Interpersonal Communication, Vol. 2. (2008, edited with Gerd Antos), Mouton de Guyter, The World Told and the World Shown (2009, edited with Jesus Moya Guijarro), Palgrave, and From Language to Multimodality (2009, edited with Carys Jones), Equinox.