Adopting a multimodal critical discourse approach, the paper sets out to investigate how war discourses are reinforced via the commemoration of past events and their musealization. It does so by drawing on systemic functional linguistics and multimodal semiotics to explore the role agency and transitivity (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004) in the several semiotic resources codeployed in a section named “The Trench” of the permanent exhibition “First World War Galleries” at the IWM (London). The section contains a plethora of memorabilia, interactive maps and games alongside a series of first-hand war experiences the visitors can have (such as wearing WWI clothes, living in a rebuilt fake trench and listening to bomb whistles) producing a mixture of complex, multimodal experiences (Ravelli & Stenglin, 2008, Ravelli 2006, Christidou & Diamantopoulou 2016), unfolding across time and three-dimensional space. The aim of the paper is to reveal how agency and transitivity are used to perpetuate a sort of past time sacralization of the Great War, triggering a simplification of the carnage, as if it were delivered to a space-time universe which is different from ours. Via the re-enacting and re-embodying of the war experience, the exhibition seems to help to reinforce and keep alive war discourses as something to be performed, promoting a certain type of militarism lurching between fiction and reality. The paper advocates for a multimodal textual de-construction of the rationale behind certain types of “experiences”, thus creating a safe distance from the commemorative rhetoric that feeds the myth of the possibility of a “just war” sublimating the idea of the catastrophe (Cambria, 2018).
"A War to End All Wars": Re-enacting and Re-embodying War Discourse. A Multimodal Analysis of Agency at WWI Galleries
Cambria Mariavita
2021-01-01
Abstract
Adopting a multimodal critical discourse approach, the paper sets out to investigate how war discourses are reinforced via the commemoration of past events and their musealization. It does so by drawing on systemic functional linguistics and multimodal semiotics to explore the role agency and transitivity (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004) in the several semiotic resources codeployed in a section named “The Trench” of the permanent exhibition “First World War Galleries” at the IWM (London). The section contains a plethora of memorabilia, interactive maps and games alongside a series of first-hand war experiences the visitors can have (such as wearing WWI clothes, living in a rebuilt fake trench and listening to bomb whistles) producing a mixture of complex, multimodal experiences (Ravelli & Stenglin, 2008, Ravelli 2006, Christidou & Diamantopoulou 2016), unfolding across time and three-dimensional space. The aim of the paper is to reveal how agency and transitivity are used to perpetuate a sort of past time sacralization of the Great War, triggering a simplification of the carnage, as if it were delivered to a space-time universe which is different from ours. Via the re-enacting and re-embodying of the war experience, the exhibition seems to help to reinforce and keep alive war discourses as something to be performed, promoting a certain type of militarism lurching between fiction and reality. The paper advocates for a multimodal textual de-construction of the rationale behind certain types of “experiences”, thus creating a safe distance from the commemorative rhetoric that feeds the myth of the possibility of a “just war” sublimating the idea of the catastrophe (Cambria, 2018).Pubblicazioni consigliate
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