Multimodality in Franz Kafka’s The Castle and its Movie by Konstantin Seliverstov: A Reading in the Light of Reception Theory

Multimodal analysis, as a technique of decoding the hidden messages within sign systems, has revolutionized the field of meaning-making and the process of interpretation. The process of communicating messages or forming ideologies is no longer dependent on the verbal input presented to the reader or the audience. The paralinguistic elements, that comprise all the audiovisual and kinesthetic content communicated to the recipient, are pivotal in understanding and interpreting the intended, as well as the unintended, messages revealed through the multimodal collage. The fact that multimodal analysis can unveil meaning and interpretations that might not have been intended by the author paves the way before reception theories to act as a complementary and an interdisciplinary discipline with multimodality. The aim of this paper is to investigate how Franz Kafka’s The Castle and its movie by Konstantin Seliverstov function as multimodal ensembles that disclose the mechanisms of sense-making, and how the text and the media text cast light on the cognitive process of interpretation itself. The paper also aims to point out, through the analysis of the text and the media text, the importance of reception theories when introducing a multimodal analysis and when studying the cognitive process of interpreting and reacting to a content. With the death of the author, the transience of meaning, the instability of the sign, the written text can no longer function as an enclosed entity and the reader is always summoned to reconstruct and recontextualize the meaning communicated to him.