POETRY/MUSIC INTERFACE IN “LONDON:” TOWARDS A MULTIMODAL SEMIOTIC READING

Abstract

This paper entitled “Poetry/ Music Interface in “London:” Towards a Multimodal Semiotic Reading” aims at examining the way William Blake’s London was “re- written” by being both adopted and adapted for an animated song in 2008. It seeks to show first, that the traditional readings of Blake’s Works which analysed his poetry and visual art separately have failed to articulate their ontological dimensions and did not come to terms with the energetics of Blake’s oeuvre that consists mainly of creating parallel universes. The paper, later, focuses on the interface between the words, the image and the rhythm in Alex Robinson’s “London” (2008) which suggested a new way of understanding Blake’s London and the world in general. The choice of the mode through which to re-introduce what was written is at the crux of the “re-writing” process and music is one of the most persuasive modes in what Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen refer to as “multimodal communication.” The multimodal discourse accentuates the importance of the different modes of communication including the word, sound, image, rhythm and colour, and stresses the importance of their added meanings; hence my choice of multimodal semiotic analysis for this paper.