Visual Discourses of War: A Multimodal Approach

This book is a multimodal critical discourse analysis of visual discourses of war realised in different genres of communication in Britain, the US and Europe over the last 150 years. It argues that while there has been extensive work produced on the linguistic realisation of discourses of war, for example through the speeches of politicians and official documents, there has been a lack of attention to the way that these discourses are disseminated visually through a range of genres of communication. It argues that war and conflict are legitimised not just in official speeches and news texts but through toys, photography, news footage, computer war games, war monuments and sites of heritage tourism. These are the ways that children and the wider public are schooled in particular models of war, why wars are fought, how they are fought and who this involves. The book shows how discourses of war have changed over time and how the visual has a particularly important role due to its less denotative and more symbolic nature as compared to language. It argues that visually realised discourses index the way that discourse of war have changed over time in a way that, given the conclusions drawn in the literature, linguistically realised discourses do not. These discourses of war are always fused with particular political ideologies about the meaning of war and society itself during those times and at each time serve to obscure the nature of war and to make it thinkable. The book argues that this has meant that in contemporary society there is a kind of consensual blindness as to why we should persist in warfare that clearly fails in its so called #xE2;#xAC;#xDC;humanitarian#xE2;#xAC;" aims.