Making Political Posters Expressive: Interdiscursive and Intrasemiotic Resources of Multimodal Creativity

Abstract

This article considers political posters as multimodal texts containing interdiscursive elements which produce linguistic and pictorial creative patterns. The aim of the research is to reveal the way interdiscursive resources work in political posters on the basis of intersemiosis to expressively shape politically relevant information and to impact the recipients emotionally. The sample includes modern British and American political posters with interdiscursive elements which were intentionally embedded into political still visuals to create new layers of meaning. The purpose of this carefully designed discursive hybridization is to attract the recipients’ attention and, in the long run, to affect their electoral choices. The research is set in the framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, it also employs stylistic, structural and semantic types of analysis. The examination reveals the sources of interdiscursive items that encompass sport, cinematic, virtual and art discourses. It also elucidates the way interdiscursive elements are integrated into a multimodal text of a political poster on verbal and non-verbal levels. The article contains a case study of a poster based on the combination of political, advertising and cinematic discourses. The analysis shows how the interaction of discourses generates multimodal creativity and how intersemiosis stimulates a careful orchestration of semiotically divergent elements of the target and donor discourses, which ultimately conveys a powerful message. The study is novel as it specifies the notions of multimodal creativity and intersemiosis in reference to political still visuals. The methodology employed in this research opens up new avenues in exploring interdiscursivity and multimodal creativity in other types of text used in visual political communication, such as editorial cartoons and memes.