How do you analyse a text whose meaning is made by images, layout and the interplay of word and picture?
Analyse how visual and graphic elements - image, composition, layout and their relationship to words - create meaning and effect in a literary text.
How to analyse the visual and graphic dimension of literary texts - picture books, graphic narratives, film stills and illustrated poems - reading composition and word-image interplay as deliberate meaning.
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What this dot point is asking
The shared studies in English Literary Studies may include texts with graphic or visual elements, and the Responding to Texts assessment type, worth 50% of your grade, expects you to analyse these texts as closely as you analyse prose and poetry. A graphic narrative, an illustrated poem, a picture book or a film sequence makes meaning through visual choices, and the performance standards reward understanding of how those conventions create meaning and effect. The mistake to avoid is treating the pictures as decoration for the words; in a visual text the image is doing analytical work of its own.
Close visual analysis uses a vocabulary parallel to close reading. Composition is to an image what syntax is to a sentence: it arranges elements to guide attention and imply relationships. Your task is to notice the arrangement and argue its effect.
The grammar of the image
A handful of visual choices carry most of the meaning. What is placed at the centre and what at the edge, and what does that prominence imply? How does the framing - close, distant, cropped - position the viewer in relation to the subject? What does colour, or its absence, contribute to tone? Where does the layout lead the eye, and in graphic narratives, how does the gutter between panels ask the reader to supply time and movement? Each of these is an analysable choice.
Read word and image together
In texts that combine words and pictures, the relationship between the two is itself a source of meaning. Sometimes the image confirms the words; more interestingly, it can complicate or contradict them, opening an irony the words alone could not produce. The richest analysis attends to the interplay rather than to either channel alone.
Use precise visual terminology
Common error
Close by connecting the visual choices to the text's larger meaning, and where words and images both appear, to what their relationship achieves together. Treating visual and graphic elements as deliberate, analysable craft, equal in seriousness to language, is exactly the breadth of close textual analysis the performance standards reward across the range of text types you study.