Towards a Rhetoric of Collage: Reading and Repetition across Mode and Media
Towards a Rhetoric of Collage: Reading and Repetition across Mode and Media

Summary/Abstract: No longer confined to the analysis of the word on the page, contemporary narratology has expanded to define and critique a dizzying array of media theories and textual practices – from Marshall McLuhan’s media-messaging to Henry Jenkins’s media-convergence, from political campaigns to Star Wars, and from virtual gameworlds to multimedia storyworlds – and yet scant attention has been paid to the formative role played by collage as both a transmedial narrative structure and a dominant form of multimodal practice. This paper represents an attempt to better define the theory and practice of collage and collage narrative, and, in so doing, to make the case for a more holistic approach to the definition of collage and the rhetoric of the various reading strategies employed in comprehending the patterns and messages conveyed by the collage. Beginning with an assessment of the narrativity of collage, this paper considers the communicative and structural poetics involved in modernist visual parody and postmodern textual art, and how these collage elements are also integral to the visual poetics of contemporary graphic storytelling. Citing examples from Marcel Duchamp, Donald Barthelme, and Chris Ware, this brief study represents an attempt to better define the theory and practice of collage and collage narrative, and, thereby, provide a means of more accurately understanding the rhetorical processes involved in the creation and comprehension of collage as a storytelling mechanism.

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