Semiotic resources in the curious incident of the dog in the night-time: the narrative power of the visual in multimodal fiction

Abstract

A ficção multimodal, recentemente estudada por Hallet (2009), Gibbons (2012) e Maziarczyk (2011; 2012), entre outros, é o fenómeno compartilhado por aqueles romances que combinam vários modos semióticos no desenvolvimento da narrativa. O objetivo do presente trabalho é dar conta dos recursos semióticos mais salientes usados no romance multimodal The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time de Mark Haddon (2004). Tendo em conta o trabalho que ainda é necessário fazer neste campo e a crescente profusão e diversidade de formas literárias multimodais nos últimos anos, este estudo visa lançar nova luz sobre as diversas formas em que a inclusão estratégica dos vários recursos semióticos opera na ficção.

Multimodal fiction, as recently studied by Hallet (2009), Gibbons (2012), and Maziarczyk (2011; 2012), among others, is the phenomenon shared by those novels which combine various semiotic modes in the development of the narrative. The purpose of the present work is to account for the most salient semiotic resources used in the multimodal novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2004). In view of the work which still needs to be done in the field, and the increasing profusion and diversity of multimodal literary forms in recent years, this study aims at throwing new light upon the diverse and significant ways in which the strategic inclusion of various semiotic resources operates in fiction.