Book review of Frank Serafini (2022), Beyond the Visual

What is it about?

The book discusses a series of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approaches to conducting studies in multimodality, including bibliographical references and 16 "vignettes" in which scholars show how they use these approaches. In my review I claim that the book's weakness resides mainly in its lack of attention to methodological matters, and its complete lack of attention to cognitive approaches to multimodality.

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Photo by Acton Crawford on Unsplash

Photo by Acton Crawford on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Multimodality is a subdiscipline that receives increasing attention within humanities research. But if the methods adopted to analyse it remain weak and unverifiable, multimodality will never be recognized as a serious discipline.