Critical review of Gibbons' Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature

What is it about?

Routledge introduces volume 3 of ‘Studies in Multimodality’, entitled “Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature” by Gibbons (2012), who proposes in her eight-chapter book a stepping stone towards the establishment of an idealistic, stylistically impenetrable, dynamic and experimental multimodal evaluation of literature, which employs both verbal and visual modes: multimodality and cognitive poetics. Both disciplines are integrated to synthesize the so-called “multimodal cognitive poetics”. This review aims to evaluate Gibbons’ model of multimodal cognitive poetics (MCP) and to correlate it to the pertinent theories for predicting how this model may contribute to the multimodal cognitive studies in a meaningful way.

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Why is it important?

Although Gibbons claims a neuro-scientific support for her perspective, in chapters 3 and 4, neither the classical model of cognitive processing of languages, which focus on Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas as cortical language regions, nor the new model, which explains the clinical problems caused by lesions outside the classical regions and attributes most of language processing pathways to the left inferior fronto-occipital fascicle, provides unequivocal evidence on Gibbon's model. Implicating on multimodal interpretation, emphasis should have been placed on neuroanatomical pathways of multimodal language processing that is regulated, as evinced by diffusion tensor imaging and brain electrostimulation studies, in the middle component of the deep layer of the left inferior fronto-occipital fascicle, also named the extreme capsule fiber system (Catani and Jones 2005; Moritz-Gasser et al. 2013).