A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Filmic Discourse The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby,a novelette written by American writer Francis Fitzgerald(1896-1940),gains an important status in American literature history after it was published in 1925 and has been adapted into film for five times.Till now,abundant researches on the novelette The Great Gatsby have been done from theories of literature.However,few researchers have studied its film adaptation from the linguistic perspective.This thesis,based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar(VG)and Van Leeuwen’s Auditory Grammar(AG),adopting QQ Player and Praat,has conducted a multimodal discourse analysis on the film The Great Gatsby directed by Baz Luhrmann in 2013,in terms of visual mode,auditory mode and the integration of the two,with an aim to explore how the meaning is constructed by visual and auditory modalities in the filmic discourse.It is found that firstly in terms of visual modes,narrative processes in the representational meanings by means of non-linear narration play a role in setting suspense,depicting characters,building up characters’ relationships and promoting the plots,conceptual processes reveal the implication of the “green light”,a symbol of Gatsby’s American dream and love dream.Interactive meanings cause the emotional resonance between viewers and characters,and “color” indicates class hierarchy and morality decline in Modern Industrial Civilization.Compositional meanings realize a reasonable layout of characters and settings.Secondly,in terms of auditory modes,voiceover,natural sound and music jointly reinforce the context and embody the social distance through pitch.Thirdly,the integration of visual and auditory modalities helps get across its theme via synchronization relationship and contraposition relationship.In short,this thesis aims to broaden the research dimension in interpreting The Great Gatsby by analyzing its filmic discourse from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis to point out its efficiency in the transformation of Gatsby’s characteristics from vague to explicit,from shallow to great,and to give a proposal of integrating different modalities to film-makers.