Hello English students and welcome again to Excel English. You may be watching this video as part of a series of video lessons looking at multimodal texts. You should hopefully have already watched the introduction video on French Milk because this video will be focused on a guided annotation of the text.
This will only be useful for you if you have your text ready to annotate. You have a pencil or whatever it is you use to annotate your text. You should also have already read the text yourself. There's certainly no point in undergoing a guided annotation without having already looked at the text yourself.
Because obviously, you know, this analysis will be meaningless unless you're actually familiar with the text being analyzed. Okay, without further ado, let's jump in. If we look at this first panel, we see that there is one single image combined. with text that kind of runs down the side. A full page panel like this is known in the comic world as a splash page and this is a splash page with a focus of Knisley's passion for comic art.
The representation of characters from Tintin is foregrounded centrally in the middle of the text and the text kind of moves around it. I would call this an example of intertextuality. Knisley here is referencing this comic tradition of which she is such a strong admirer. This isn't Tintin.
This is a tribute to Tintin and therefore an example of intertextuality, one text referencing another. In terms of the format of this text, we have this little box caption at the top which represents the text as a diary entry. And that's significant because that's a repeated feature of the discourse structure of this text.
Knisely is mostly using capitalized lettering, which is the standard typography for comic texts. But she does occasionally mix in lowercase, as you can see in the word Pompidou there. So there's this sort of deviation from the standard comic orthography, which is, I think, helping to represent her own idiosyncratic and imperfect style. This text is quite sketchy.
It's quite loose. It has its imperfections and I feel that this is also linked perhaps to Knisley's self-representation. This isn't a highly edited, highly polished, perfected text just as Knisley doesn't present herself as a kind of a perfect individual.
She has her own what we might call idiosyncratic flaws in the text. She uses throughout these initials and the initial is the larger capital at the start of sentences. This is a traditional way of starting paragraphs and it helps I think to guide the reader's eye especially where there is a like irregular line structure or irregular paragraphing.
So these act as a kind of a visual aid but they're also a feature of discourse in that where you see an initial you're expecting some kind of a topic shift because you realize that that initial is delineating a new paragraph. There's a feature that you can analyze throughout this diary format which is that Knisely is often omitting the subject from her sentences. For example, the very first line in this page started off the day with a visit to the Pompidou. Normally, you would have a subject in this sentence.
It would be, I started off, or we started off, or they started off. There would be someone doing the starting off. Instead, we actually get this fragmented and quite informal feature, which is repeated throughout the extract. It started off, saw a...
Now, I think in a personal diary entry, a writer can obviously assume that it's being written either for themselves or for a very limited audience. who will know that they themselves are the subject of the sentence and so that subject is omitted. But it helps create a very specific register appropriate for a diary entry. Let's have a closer look at some of the language in here, particularly the way that she represents Hergé and his work.
Knisely's language here is using a hyperbole. We get this intensifying adverb incredibly and this repeated adjective gorgeous which is helping to convey her passion for the works she also uses an idiom all-time greats which is somewhat cliched and that is a way of her representing her own authority on the subject in my opinion one of the all-time comics greats it kind of implies that she has looked at so she she understands all of the comics available and that she has like a broad knowledge of this field of art We also get this opinion hedged but with that adverbial subclause in my opinion. So although she's presenting herself as an authority on the subject, she's also making us aware that she's presenting her own subjective opinion and that she's open to debate.
So this is obviously a feature of the text or a focus of the text that is aimed particularly at people who are interested specifically in. comics and people who might be interested in debates about who the greatest comic writers or artists are. We then get this little parallel rhetorical construction, the detail that really makes the work. Almost sounds like an advertising slogan. It does have a rhetorical function.
It's a parallelism which draws attention to Hergé's, the artist for Tintin, Hergé's skill. We could also point out Tintin's emanata, the use of punctuation marks around his head, sort of a distinctive style. and again part of her visual tribute to Tintin.
There's also a semantic field within this extract connected to art and to comics. We have drawings, exhibits, showcase, resin and installation later as she talks about some of the artworks that she's seen in the Pompidou Centre. Clearly Knisley is someone who knows how to, who understands the language of art and is able to use that in her writing. and that also reflects in her audience.
Her audience are probably quite broadly culturally aware people who perhaps are interested in different forms of creativity and artistic expression. In the next panel we get a photographic panel and the only photographic representation in our extract although I believe there are others in the full text. So this is an example of mixed visual modes even within the visual there are different mixed modes.
Here we have also a slightly odd feature of language in that she chooses the play script conventions to represent a snippet of speech between her mum and herself. So this is unpunctuated direct speech but it's presented using play script conventions. So the speaker is identified before the speech with a colon to show what they are saying.
And the nature of this language is quite... personal in fact it's highly personal it's her mum telling her about when her father and she tried to conceive so I think by including highly personal information Knisley is showing her preparedness to be very candid and very open with her reader and it's offering the intimacy I suppose of a private diary we could use conversational analysis If you check the playlist for videos on analysing spoken discourse, if you're familiar with the theories in pragmatics, and particularly how those can be applied to analysing spoken discourse, we can look at her response to being told that mum tried to conceive her in this building, as using a fragmentation, an ellipsis, this kind of stunted response that flouts the maximum quality. And there's an implicature there which is conveying the...
awkwardness of the topic. Knisely presents that perhaps she doesn't have much to say about this and who can blame her? It's a sort of a strange thing to be thinking of.
In the next slide we have what looks like a typical Parisian setting and an evocative Parisian setting and you know I think one that perhaps you might have identified or you might be able to identify as Paris. even without the linguistic clues. Again it's a splash page of an evocative Parisian setting but significantly it's presented at a first-person perspective. It looks like an eye-level perspective piece and that's relevant because the language is also of course in the first-person perspective. The panel itself is rich in different sensory imagery and some of that's being conveyed through the visual aspect and some of that's being conveyed through the language.
So we have the emanata there from the streetlight implying the darkness. We have this curious little labeling of the cobblestones, which seems like an attempt to add a little bit of realist detail to the text, or perhaps Knisley just wasn't that confident that she'd accurately represented cobblestones and felt the need to label it to make sure that we knew what we were looking at. Again, we make the point that this isn't a perfect text. It's very idiosyncratic. It's very quirky.
In this text, or in the text accompanying this panel, the dexis is establishing a chronological narrative. There's temporal dexis, afterwards, then, and as, and the spatial dexis back, suggesting this is part of a journey, part of a movement, part of their days traveling around, and that they're returning back at the end of a day. Knisley is using a lot of value-laden adjectives.
So these are adjectives, I guess, that present a kind of a personal opinion. And these are presenting a personal perspective of the events, particularly the food that she eats. It's amazing.
It's fresh. It's gorgeous. But she also has a taste for diminutives.
We have teeny and little. And these, I suppose, are presenting the setting, presenting Paris as intimate or quaint. Teeny is an interesting one. It of course is informal but it's also a feature of child directed speech and this is retaining quite a youthful, almost naive sounding register in the text and it's a feature that we will actually see elsewhere as well. On this, I think the fourth page, the focus now turns to Knisely herself and her own relationship with her boyfriend.
And that's made clear because Knisely foregrounds herself at the very top of the page. She does that with this distinctive emanata. Remember, emanata is this use of symbolism around the head of a character to focus you on their... their kind of mental response um this emanata is distinctive the word fume the infinitive verb um to fume meaning to be or in this in this context meaning to be extremely angry and that's also represented in the typography because we get this kind of um you know like edgy sharp wavy, almost unbalanced typography.
And that's immediately before you read any of the text, you realize that combining that with her facial expression, you realize that there's a kind of an emotive tone to this particular panel and to this particular page. We then get a chronological sequence of events, which are in the past perfect tense and using first-person inclusive perspective. including these adjacent structures as she goes adjacent to parallel structures sorry as she goes on to explore Paris and you look down we get we rode the train over the Eiffel Tower but the crowds were too much to handle for long we walked along the Champs-Élysées but the crowds were even worse there so two parallel sentences foregrounding this contrast between what you expect or your expectations of Paris and this reality of the crowds This is a theme that we've seen represented in other individual accounts of Paris, of course contrasted perhaps with those texts that try to sell or promote Paris.
It's worth looking a little bit more closely here at the language she uses to represent her relationship and also to self-represent because it's quite distinctive. She says that she was pretty upset by a condescending reply email from John rebuking her. rebuking me from being homesick when I've been given an opportunity as if I didn't already feel guilty about not being thrilled. Her language here is changing perhaps or is distinct compared to some of the other language that's featured in this extract and it's worth looking at why and how that's achieved.
So first of all we get this moderate intensifying adverb and yes I know that moderate and intensifying are almost... or almost opposites, but she uses this pretty upset as a way of hedging her views about her boyfriend. I think this is euphemistic.
I think she's really upset. I think she's seriously upset because, well, fume. So this choice of pretty upset I feel is a kind of a euphemistic understatement.
And that to me seems to be an aspect of spoken register that's lowering the formality of the text. It seems like this is the way that she's trying to get people to understand the way that she's writing. someone would tell you personally about a disagreement that they had.
She then goes into the details of her argument with her boyfriend and the language used here is interesting. We get this value-laden adjective condescending which gives her opinion about how he has spoken to her. Condescending is an example of a fairly rarefied Lexis. her language condescending and rebuking are actually is actually very precise she has the sort of emotive semantic field she uses some very exact terms she reports the speech act of being rebuked of being ie told off that is a speech act and that's reported with that verb rebuking and that I think implies how patronized she felt by his attitude She then presents a snippet of his own speech.
She presents his punctuated direct speech in a way to kind of add credibility to her account, to give us an actual taste of what was said to her. And I think we're supposed to agree that that's a terrible thing and he shouldn't have said that to her. It adds credibility to her position that she's been condescended to.
And then finally we get this kind of rhetorical feature of understatement where she says the opposite of what she actually feels. And that conveys the irony of her situation. This is what we might call litotes, as if I didn't already feel guilty about not being thrilled.
So she's expressing the opposite situation as if everything was okay, as if everything was fine. Actually she is saying I do feel guilty. because I'm not thrilled so by expressing it in the opposite way to the way that it is I suppose this is a way of highlighting the kind of irony of her situation that she feels she's being told things that she didn't need to hear finally then we get this kind of she finishes this argument off she frames her description of the argument with her boyfriend with this rhetorical question, which brings the focus away from her relationship with her boyfriend and back to Paris in quite a knowing and self-aware way.
The rhetorical question, isn't it part of Paris in the winter to be brooding? She's acknowledging this romantic Parisian cliche, Paris and the seasons, but she's using the present participle verb brooding to actually describe her own actions. and that's conveying a degree of self-awareness in that perhaps she knows that she's actually overreacting somewhat. There's an element of self-deprecation here where she's perhaps looking at herself with a sense of detachment and I think that helps us to understand her viewpoint and also to relate to her a little bit more closely because she seems to be aware that she's overreacted in this situation.
The next panel is a kind of an abstracted panel describing her mum and the way that her mum likes to wake up and be fully active first thing in the morning. The topic marker in the little caption box with the arrow there establishes mum as the focus of this page. And the caption, I guess, is deviating from this diary format. This doesn't seem to be happening on a particular day.
So this is more of a general reflection on her personal relationships rather than a specific event. We get this interesting presentation and spatially the way that things are laid out on the screen here is quite interesting. We've got, I guess, a series of chronological panels that show how very quickly her mum becomes an unbearable presence in the morning. In order to present this...
There's a mixture of visual and text and particularly standing out is this distinctive typography. Full steam ahead is an idiom that is borrowed, I guess, from trains, I would assume, but has become an idiomatic phrase that describes anything that is kind of to the maximum. And Knisley's presented this with a distinctive typography of underlining and oversizing it.
which is a way of foregrounding the focus of this page on her mum's extreme behaviour. We then get this torrent of speech bubbles representing her mother's speech directly, and they're mostly a series of questions, most of which don't have answers, although Knisely does represent some conversation in the end where she's responding, I don't know, and just let me sleep. We can offer a pragmatic analysis of this conversation. We love to use pragmatics to analyze spoken discourse.
And here, Knisely herself is flouting maxims of manner and quantity. Mm is flouting the manner of maxim because that isn't English. It's just grunting. And that's not the expected way that we respond in conversations where we are cooperating. She's also flouting the manner of quantity because she isn't actually answering the questions.
She's giving deliberately short responses. Why is this? Well, the implicature for flouting these maxims is showing that she is overwhelmed by her mother's speech and that this is an unwelcome conversation.
We normally talk about Grice's maxims in terms of the cooperative principles of speech. This is an example of, I guess, uncooperative conversation in that Knisely is showing how she doesn't want to cooperate in talking with her mum about these things. Finally, then, at the bottom, there's this hyperbolic metaphor of Olympic calibre, which I think is quite humorous, describing her mum waking up in the morning as if it was an Olympic event. This is an informal and idiosyncratic kind of register. It's quite humorous.
She also uses this verb. grumping which is an example of kind of linguistic creativity she's taken the adjective grumpy and turned it into a verb You are grumping someone. It's a non-standard usage, but it's creative and it seems affectionate and a kind of a unique use of language relevant to Knisely.
By this point in the text Knisely has already explored her relationship with her boyfriend and already explored her relationship with her mother, neither of which are perfect. She's also explored the setting of Paris and in this page all of those elements kind of come together with a focus on combination of Paris as a romantic location and also on Knisely's personal relationships with her boyfriend and her mother. There's a variety of linguistic presentation and visual presentation in this particular slide in this particular page, sorry.
This combines direct speech and direct thought through the speech bubbles and the thought bubbles and it's always worth identifying that there's a difference in tense. between what's presented directly and what's presented as a kind of a narrative reflection. So the narrative commentary is in the past tense that describes the setting and the sequence of actions during this day but it also uses the present this narrative commentary. She expresses her feelings in the present tense I am in Paris without my lover or I like cool cars and it's we're thinking about a diary format. and the way that a diary is written.
A diary entry is normally written usually I guess in the evening after the completion of a day so this is perhaps nicely looking back on the events of the day in the past tense but also looking at her present feelings which at the time of writing remain kind of unresolved and current feelings. She has I would say a somewhat juvenile register. I didn't really want to call it childish but it is sometimes quite childish um but a juvenile register um a young register uh representation maybe of her innocence uh lack of experience and her naivety in relationship she refers to um to the opposite sex as boys um she said they peaked um at some cars which i think is is quite juvenile uh register she refers to her mother as mom uh now obviously that's distinctive um American dialect, US English but also I think it's somewhat juvenile and she describes herself as being mad.
I think this is a juvenile register. This register and this language combines with the visual images in this slide that helped present relationship within the narrative. So facial expression in the first panel and in the second panel the image of the closeness between her and her mother, them walking hand in hand, representing this romantic, giving this romantic representation, I beg your pardon, of Paris. Here's a shopping list.
Sketches in abstraction of things that they have been buying. And that's an example, I would call this an example of intertextuality. And this is a highly flexible text. that can combine different genres. Here it's a non-fiction genre.
The items, as I said, are sketched in abstraction from their setting. Like shopping lists, this is a list of concrete nouns, but there are also orthographical features. There's a kind of a shopping list register at play here.
The abbreviation of the chicken W slash, meaning of course with this abbreviation. The ampersand, often used to shorten items in a list. And these are common in functional texts where they're convenient tools for creating lists. We also have that opening sentence which still frames the shopping list in the diary form. But again, the subject is missing.
Spent most of today in our now familiar market. We spent... would be the grammatically standard version of that but in the context of a diary shorthand register this is great. She also uses exclamation and this determiner more cornichon which I think is displaying her passion or the sense of excitement that she feels about eating Parisian gherkins.
The second to last page, the penultimate page here, there is quite a dense page in which Knisley really explores her passion for literature, for comics, but also the way that she respects the Parisian literary tradition. So there's a juxtaposition of setting and her personal memories. So this is a combination, I guess, of both Paris and Knisley. and her self-representation being presented on this page. Again her language features hyperbole whenever the focus is on cartoons or comics we get this hyperbolic register.
She has tons, the value agent adjective lovely, these convey her passion. Her narrative is full of informal spoken features, a couple comic shops. should be a couple of comic shops but that's a feature of US dialect I think the idiomatic phrase too bad and the elision m these all sound I guess like a very informal kind of spoken tone finally though towards the bottom of this extract she is then exploring her relationship or what she sees as her relationship with different authors.
There's a range of proper nouns used on this particular page which help present relationships within the text and particularly Knisely's own perspective. So if we consider the demonym, a demonym is a proper noun that's derived from a geographical location so we get the Europeans really get their comic shops right this proper noun the Europeans is very broad and it contrasts with the specific personal first names of her pals Sarah, Hope and Brian. So here is someone who knows intimately people in her own kind of comic community back in the US but here she can only speak of the Europeans a little bit more generally. Then towards the end of this page She's using the surnames of literary greats such as Hemingway, Wilde, Sedaris, Atwood, where she's using their surnames to, I guess, make a reference or allusions to literature that will be understood by her readers.
There's some writers on there that I'm very excited about as well, so I can relate to this text. Knisley is also describing these people metaphorically, I think, as her familiar friends. and how she says I love them for themselves creating this sense of her kind of what she feels is having an intimate personal relationship with these famous writers and of course that's metaphorical because I don't think she's actually a friend of Ernest Hemingway because I doubt their lives even overlapped there is also examples of comic jargon on this page which is good I think for talking about audience and the fact that one I suppose sub audience of this text would be the comic community and comic specialists I don't know what panel structure and scanning techniques really are this is jargon because it's aimed at specialist audience with specialist understandings so finally then the extract finishes with a juxtaposition of setting and food and it has this sort of first-person perspective we feel like we're and we're looking up at Notre Dame with the sun shining all around it with this the Emanata representing the sunshine and we also feel that we've got a plate of food right in front of us we get this first-person perspective of that too there are cultural illusions referencing Notre Dame she references Victor Hugo who is sort of a famous French literary figure and Walt Disney who you will know is perhaps less literary but certainly no less famous or probably even more famous and I guess it's a combination of what you might call highbrow culture and popular culture a way of broadly accepting her audience will have different perspectives and different representations of Paris and she can connect with a range of readers through using these kinds of cultural references her language is as ever idiosyncratic and quite charmingly so her food is deelish which i quite like this is an elision of the word delicious rather than have three syllables let's chop it down to two syllables let's put the stress on the opening d which wouldn't normally be stressed in poetry we would describe that as a spondee because it has two stressed syllables, de-lish, a creative expression of delight, very idiosyncratic, very personal. We got to the end, so like nicely, as the interjection goes, woo! OK, thank you for following this guided annotation and for watching this video.
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Thank you again for your focus. I hope it was useful for you and good luck with your studies.