Aims

During the XX century, the written culture has more and more been associated with visual culture, both in the paraliterary productions (albums for children, comic strips, daily press or magazines, advertising, songs and video clips...) and in the literary ones (illustrations, illustrated peritext, typographic visualisation, and of course the recent media or electronic forms...). The main objectif of the course is to offer to the students, who are bound to meet this combined messages during their research or professional activities, a clear and strict theoretical and methodological outline. This will enable them to analyse what the meaning of this mixture of text and image is, taking into account that this analysis has to deal with the specificities of each expression mode and with their interaction.

Main themes

The course will be based on a prior analysis of the historico-sociological stakes of the study of combined messages. It will also be based on epistemological thinking on the relations between the scriptural metalanguage and the visual messages (icons, plastics).
A critical synthesis of the principal theories related to the study of the text-image relation( or connected to the study of one of the 2 modes, insofar as this study can contribute to the final theoretical working out) is suggested to the students ; It ends up with the set up of methodological tools likely to be used for diversified reading of combined messages.
The identification, interpretation and confrontation of the cultural, ideological and symbolical contents conveyed explicitely or implicitely by the language components of the combined messages should not be ignored.

Content and teaching methods

Different kinds of combined messages will be studied (comic strips, illustrated text, advertising, songs, televisual commentary,etc.). Also their specific production and consumers will be studied. By taking into account the semiological working similarities (resonance, narrativity, rhetoricity ...) and the relation speficications that are created between image and text (redundancy, complementarity, supplementarity), this study can help us elaborate a " reception " theory and its pedagogy.
Theoretical courses will be alternated with individual and collective analysis activities.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Prerequisites : Since the abilities to analyse texts will be called up, students not coming from a ROM section are expected to be familiar with these study fields.

Evaluation : Oral exam on the course ; a paper with the analysis of a combined message will be presented by the student at the exam.

Teaching materials : Ex Cathedra course containing theoretical parts and the analysis of the productions of combined messages. A critical bibliography is at the students' disposal at the secretary's office of the ROM section.

Other credits in programs