A Study Of The Dynamic Discourses Of The Peony Fairy Legends

Nowadays people are used to taking all kinds of semiotics, such as pictures, music, sound or gestures to express meanings instead of the only form of language. The same way goes to the acceptance of the new information and we are more adept at receiving the messages conveyed in different patterns. We can say it is a world full of colorful semiotics or a world of multimodality, the combination of different semiotic modes—for example, language and music— in a communicative artifact event. It seems to be of great deficiency to analyze such modern multimodal discourses by adopting the methods in the traditional discourse analysis which concentrated on language. Thus Multimodality Discourse Analysis(MDA), which is the analysis of several or all of the different semiotic modes in a text or communicative event, sprang up in 1990 s. Kress and Van Leeuwen are such outstanding researchers in MDA that their Reading Images(1996, 2006) sets the milestone for analyzing visual discourses and provides the most systematic and comprehensive theoretic framework for the visual discourse analysis. Van Leeuwen’s audio theories, in Speech, Sound, Music(1999), play the fundamental role in the audio discourse exploration. O’ Halloran’s popular Mise-and-scene framework which adopts the frame as the basic unit to analyze plays a role of model for the video discourse analysis. While MDA still stays in the initial step in China which is fallen far behind the foreign researches and the majority of the studies focuses on the static discourses(or only the picture discourses in the dynamic ones) that are easier than the dynamic ones due to their complex and kinetic characteristics. Therefore, the author attempts to do a dynamic discourse analysis based on the framework formed by the visual,audio and color grammars.The peony legends were appraised and elected as the National Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011. It is an honor while a warning because the ancient original forms, written or spoken, are facing the danger of extinction, especially in such a multimodal world where the single linguistic materials are hard to be maintained and disseminated. While many modern forms of peony legends, such as the audio story, the 3D cartoon and microfilm, have emerged these years. Hence the author tries to analyze the newly emerged legend discourses, a micro film and a cartoon film are chosen, from the perspective of MDA to find whether they can inherit the ancient legends and expects to provide some suggestions to help with their preservation and succession.Accordingly, the author does a detailed survey of current situation about the MDA research at home and abroad and makes an introduction of the peony legends and the peony legend research. And the author adopts the framework based on the visual grammar,including representational, interactive and compositional meanings, audio grammar from perspective and social distance, melody and sound quality and the meaning of color. In accordance with the framework, the analysis and comparison are done between the two films based on the visual grammar, audio grammar and color singly and synthetically by analyzing their plots from all the three aspects.The study shows that both of the two films can succeed the ancient peony fairy legends. For the contents, the two peony fairies both inherit the great personalities from the ancient peony fairies, such as, beauty, courage, love and caring and affirmativeness. For the forms, they both adopt different visual, audio and color modes to express meanings. We can appreciate the peony fairies’ spirits more deeply, directly and fully not only by the visual and audio appreciation but also by the different relationships between the audience and characters constructed by different modes. So we can say it is more conductive to inherit and develop the traditional legends by adopting the multimodal expressions. The study also demonstrates that the framework adopted is of practical value to the dynamic discourse analysis. It is the comprehensive analysis from both the visual and audio aspects which can promote a more holistic expression of meaning. Therefore, it is imperative to do a multimodal analysis to a multimodal discourse.