beyond a text when they engage with it, is embedded in the multimodal orchestration
of the CD-ROM, in particular, the relationship between visual, aural and written
elements.
Intertextuality
While the ‘Novel as CD-ROM’ does the ‘imaginative work’ of constructing the
characters it also offers an intertextual construction of the entity character. In
addition to the multiple layers of the ‘Novel as CD-ROM’, the Dossier offers images,
artefacts, and audio clips from film and stage productions of the novel. This provides
a potentially more complex notion of character. Character is represented not as the
product of one person’s design∕reading rather it is represented as the multimodal
outcome of interaction with many voices and modes over time. This represents the
entity character as a dynamic entity that emerges from a social rather than an
individual production.
Multimodality
The multimodal resources of the CD-ROM demanded that students engage with the
entity character at the level of mode (visual appearance, action, and voice) and at the
level of narrative. The multimodal transformation of the characters via the resources
of the CD-ROM also repositioned the novel to account for the imagined concerns of a
contemporary audience in an educational context.
The opening scene of the first video, for example, shows the intimacy of the two
characters George and Lennie. In doing so the theme of relationships and friendship
is visually foregrounded. The characters George and Lennie are polarised by the
contrastive use of appearance, clothes, voice, gesture, composition and editing: any
sense of sameness is removed by this multimodal reshaping. Further, through these
visual resources the relationship between the two characters is constructed as an
adult-child relationship. This reshaping of the characters presents a new set of
motivations for character and narrative.
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