The Language of War Monuments

Description

This book analyses war monuments by developing a multimodal social-semiotic approach to understand how they communicate as three-dimensional objects. The book provides a practical tool-kit approach to how critical multimodal social semiotics should be done through visual, textual and material analysis. It ties this material analysis into the social and political contexts of production. Using examples across the 20th and 21st century the book's chapters offer a way of analysing the way that monument designers have used specific semiotic choices in terms of things like iconography, objects, shape, form, angularity, height, materials and surface realisation to place representations of war in public places across Britain.This social-semiotic approach to the study of war monuments serves three innovative purposes. First, it provides a contribution to the work on the ideological representations of war in Media and Cultural Studies and in Critical Discourse Analysis applied specifically to more banal realisations of discourse. Second, it responds to calls by historians for innovative ways to study war commemoration by providing an approach that offers both specific analysis of the objects and attends to matters of design. Thirdly, following in the relatively recent tradition of multimodal analysis, the arguments draw on the ideas of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001), adapting and extending their theories and models to the analysis of British commemorative war monuments, in order to develop a multimodal framework for the analysis of three dimensional objects. HalfTitle Series Title Copyright Contents List of Figures Introduction: Monuments and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Crucified by Arthur Stadler (1927) Critical Discourse Analysis and the language of war The chapters in this book CHAPTER ONE What is Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis? Communication through a system of choices Critical Discourse Analysis Semiotic resources and recontextualizing social practice Ideology and power Social Semiotics and multimodality Semiotic modes and meaning making Semiotic resources and meaning potential Historical context Conclusion CHAPTER TWO Three-dimensional Social Semiotics Semiotic resources that communicate social relations Social Semiotics of materiality Visual grammar Transitivity Conclusion CHAPTER THREE How monuments have been studied Commemoration as political ideology A psychological approach to war commemoration Conclusion CHAPTER FOUR The political context The post-WWI British political climate A trade union perspective on British military involvement Pre-conscription, spontaneous WWI commemorative shrines The widespread commissioning of WWI memorials Participation of elitist groups in the commissioning of commemorative war monuments The choice between symbolic and utilitarian memorials Centralizing war commemoration and the issue of design Cultural influences on commemorative war monument design Conclusion CHAPTER FIVE Iconography and iconology Classicism and higher moral order Christian symbolism Representation of soldiers on monuments The meaning potential of pose Conclusion CHAPTER SIX The materiality of monuments The meaning potential of materials Speech acts and gaze Transitivity on monuments Modality Anti-war commemoration Conclusion CHAPTER SEVEN Women on war monuments Women representing the Home Front Representations of women in uniform Women as personification of the nation, emotions and concepts Representations of the roles played by women in WWII monuments Conclusion CHAPTER EIGHT Changing discourses of war The Wootton Bassett war monument The Australian WWII monument The New Zealand WWI and WWII monument, London The Merchant Seamen Memorial, Wales War monument inscriptions The inscriptions of the contemporary monument Conclusion Conclusion References Index