Multimodality and transmediality in Kamal Abdulla’s short fiction: a cognitive-emotive interface

Abstract

This paper addresses the issues of in-built multimodality and transmediality as well as their interface employed in “Could You Teach Me to Fly…?”, a short story by Kamal Abdulla, a well-known Azerbaijani writer, scholar, and public figure. Relying upon the cognitive-emotive approach as the ground for multimodal text analysis, the research interprets the above concepts as interphenomena, which, along with iconicity, intermedial references, and manifestations of verbal holography as the interplay of planes and vectors, create the effect of literary text multidimensionality. The paper claims that the short story that belongs to intellectual prose foregrounds the metaphor of love as a magic gift that endows a person with capacity to fly. This metaphor is embodied in the iconic image of a white bird the woman in love turns into. The paper shows that the magic of imagery based on fairytale and mythopoetic motifs reveals itself through a set of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic manifestations of multimodality accompanied by the use of zoom-in/zoom-out cinematic techniques. The magic of paradoxical imagery, where a naked woman symbolizes an emotionally intense silence, is enhanced by discourse transmediality, due to which the key visual image of the woman-bird flying high into the sky as if evaporating transforms into an integrated kinesthetic poetry-dance-film image. Given all this, the paper suggests several techniques of cognitive-emotive multimodal analysis, which might further enrich the metamethod of literary text disambiguation as a way of its interpreting aimed to reconstruct a literary work’s conceptual structure while defining the factors of textual multidimensionality and deepness.

Keywords

• multimodality
• transmediality
• iconicity
• interphenomenon
• multidimensionality
• cognitive-emotive interface
• verbal holography
• short fiction
• intellectual prose