Volume 4, Number 1 (May 2005): Focus: English and the visual

Co-editors: Andrew Burn (Institute of Education, University of London, UK) and Helen Nixon (University of South Australia)

Rationale: English has a long, intimate relationship with the visual: the illuminated manuscripts of mediaeval romance; the woodcuts of 17C chapbooks and 18C broadsheet ballads; the painting and poetry of the pre-Raphaelites; Dickens illustrated by Cruikshank, Milton by Blake, Coleridge by Dore, Ted Hughes by Leonard Baskin; the art of the modern picture-book; the graphic novel; the comic strip from DC and Marvel to manga; the modern audio-visual narratives of film, television and computer games.

Different state and local curricula for English and the language arts recognise this bond of word and image differently around the Anglophone world. There is, in some countries, a strong backward pull towards an English that was resolutely anti-visual, defined by the sanctity of the word. While no one now would endorse the virulent objections to the visual as the enemy of the word as proposed by the disciples of Leavis, it is undeniable that the English curriculum becomes resolutely monomodal at the ultimate point of public accountability, in the exam hall, where the pictures all fade away.

In other countries, the communicative power of the image in all its variety is increasingly accorded a place of value, and children are encouraged, even required, both to analyse and produce their own visual and audiovisual texts. Meanwhile, the proponents of a grammar of visual design, Kress and van Leeuwen, argue the case for a semiotic landscape increasingly weighted towards the visual.

Over this push-me-pull-you movement of English away from and towards the image, hang some interesting conundrums, which this special issue of ETPC might probe. Do we derive a new importance for the place of the visual by looking backward over the history of literature; or forwards to a new landscape of multimedia technologies? or both? Do we continue with a sense of the visual as a semiotic appendage to language, the locus of the illustration dependent on language, as Barthes argues, for its "anchorage"? Or do we accord it a more important place, as in film, game or comic strip, where it is clearly the dominant mode? How is the case for the production of visual texts in English altered by the advent of digital technologies, allowing for the authorship of video, multimedia, web-page and computer games? Has the age-old cry of "Miss, I can't draw!" given way to a new utopia of digital design?

Another way to frame the debate is to think of the place of the image in our understanding of literacy. On the one hand we have become battered by multiple notions of literacy - visual literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, silicon literacy, cine-literacy, moving image literacy. There is a danger, maybe, that the metaphor is wearing thin; or, as some argue, that it was never properly sustainable in the first place. On the other hand, the idea of a language of film, of a grammar of visual design, both at micro and macro levels of text, and the concomitant idea of a literacy required both to interpret and produce visual texts, can make for useful and systematic models of conceptual development, metacognitive understanding and learning progression.

Finally, just to make life more difficult, how do we ensure that the visual takes its proper place alongside other communicative modes important to English - the gestural repertoires and spatial design of drama; the oral patternings of Martin Luther King, the Beowulf poet and the rap artist; the constitution of subjectivity through urban soundscapes which Steven Connor calls "the modern, auditory I". In the "turn to the visual", is there a danger of a "tyranny of the visual"?

Some of these questions are addressed by this special edition. These articles signal the final riposte to the anti-visual culture of Leavisism, address the technologies of audiovisual production, and take us beyond an embrace of the visual that is either marginal or celebratory.

View contents of issue