Books in the Cinepoetics - English edition series

Although recent linguistic and media-studies' research has increasingly dealt with forms of imagery beyond language, such as in audiovisual formats, only little attention has been paid to the specific media character of audiovisual images. This raises a theoretical as well as methodological problem: How can processes of figurative meaning making in audiovisual media be adequately conceptualized and described? The book intends to bridge this research gap with an analysis of campaign commercials, a hitherto largely underexplored object of study in metaphor and metonymy research. To achieve this goal, a transdisciplinary film-analytical and cognitive-linguistic account of audiovisual figurativity is developed and examined through a comparative analysis of figurative meaning-making processes in German and Polish campaign commercials from 2009 and 2011. By setting the inseparable intertwining of language and cinematic staging, sensing and understanding center stage, the book provides insight into the dynamic nature and embodied affective grounds of audiovisual figurativity, and challenges the long-known dichotomies of rational discourse and affective manipulation, political message and media effect.

Metaphors in audiovisual media receive increasing attention from film and communication studies as well as from linguistics and multimodal metaphor research. The specific media character of film, and thus of cinematic metaphor, remains, however, largely ignored. Audiovisual images are all too frequently understood as iconic representations and material carriers of information. Cinematic Metaphor proposes an alternative: starting from film images as affective experience of movement-images, it replaces the cognitive idea of viewers as information-processing machines, and heals the break with rhetoric established by conceptual metaphor theory. Subscribing to a phenomenological concept of embodiment, a shared vantage point for metaphorical meaning-making in film-viewing and face-to-face interaction is developed. The book offers a critique of cognitive film and metaphor theories and a theory of cinematic metaphor as performative action of meaning-making, grounded in the dynamics of viewers' embodied experiences with a film. Fine-grained case studies ranging from Hollywood to German feature film and TV news, from tango lesson to electoral campaign commercial, illustrate the framework's application to media and multimodality analysis.

Based on the premise that a society's sense of commonality depends upon media practices, this study examines how Hollywood responded to the crisis of democracy during the Second World War by creating a new genre - the wara film. Developing an affective theory of genre cinema, the study's focus on the sense of commonality offers a new characterization of the relationship between politics and poetics. It shows how the diverse ramifications of genre poetics can be explored as a network of experiental modalities that make history graspable as a continuous process of delineating the limits of community.