The Rhetoric of Multimodal Communication: Special Issue of Visual Communication

This special issue sets out to interrogate ways in which the concerns of rhetoric and multimodality research intersect and interact. Our intention is to illustrate that age-old rhetorical theory can supply concepts and methods that are suited to studying multimodal communicative processes. Such inquisitive activity, which centred around the construction of multimodal arguments, has recently gained prominence (Tseronis and Forceville, 2017; Tseronis and Pollaroli, 2018), not least because modern media have accelerated the pace and nature of mode integration. The articles in the present issue focus primarily on text-image relations, reflecting the image-centricity in much contemporary mass/social/new media (see Stöckl et al., 2020). However, the principles of multimodal and rhetorical interaction discussed here form a foundation for extension to a wide range of other modes and modal complexes.