The paradigm of narrativity communicates in the most challenging ways with another fundamental paradigm of human communication, that of multimodality. Regardless of the nature of the narratives, whether they are spoken, written, or digital narratives, a variety of semiotic resources are integrated and work together in meaning-making processes. People express meanings through narratives by making choices between semiotic resources and/or modes that are available to them in a particular social situation and moment in time (Jewitt 2014; Jewitt & Henriksen 2016; Kull 2018).
In today’s multimodal society (Baldry 2000; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001; Norris 2004; Kress 2010), where new information technologies are expanding rapidly, revealing a dynamic information ecosystem, new opportunities are emerging to explore highly abstract issues, such as the interplay between narrativity and multimodality. This special issue aims to bring together contributions that explore the multimodal nature of narrativity (Page 2010), the particular ways in which the two universal paradigms – narrativity and multimodality – communicate, in a common effort to get closer to understanding the complexity of reality.
Given this background, we invite abstracts that focus on the multimodal nature of narrativity, on applications of a social semiotic multimodal approach to the narrative texts. More analytically, abstracts can be about topics such as, but not limited to:
• political narratives and multimodality;
• media narratives, multimodality, intermediality and narrativity, transmedial nar- ration (narratives and stories in different media);
• interactive digital narrative: how the digital technologies can be used to support multimodal narrative productions;
• multimodal narratives in teaching and learning processes;
• image and narrative: graphic storytelling and visual narrative;
• narrative structure in multimodal fiction and film;
• multimodal meaning-making in specific contexts: narrative structures in advertising, branding and marketing, video games, comics, theatrical performances, visual arts, painting and photography, music and dance, etc.
Prospective authors are asked to submit an abstract of approximately 300 words by mail to the guest editor, Dr. Nicolae-Sorin Drăgan (dragan.nicolaesorin@gmail.com; or sorin.dragan@comunicare.ro), including their affiliation and contact information. Acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee publication, given that all research articles will be subjected to the journal’s double peer-review process.