Alongside this the multimodal representation of the characters Crooks and Curly’s
Wife brings them into the foreground of the novel and increases their ‘potential to
mean’.
Reshaping the Practices of Students in School English
The multimodal resources of the CD-ROM provide the students with new resources
for the engagement and construction of the entities ‘character’ and ‘novel’ in the
English classroom. The multimodal construction of the entity character is dis-
embedded from the narrative of the novel and this enables the students to engage with
marginal characters in new and profound ways. It offered several young women a
new potential to engage with the only female character in the book, Curly’s Wife,
through her emotional singing about her life, enabling them to empathise with the
possible motivation for the character’s behaviour. The multimodal ‘humanising’ of
the only Black character in the book, Crooks, as an intelligent and oppressed man
both re-positions him in the narrative and accounts for his marginal status and
derogatory naming in the original narrative firmly within the context of racism. The
multimodal construction of these marginal characters provides a multimodal filter for
the students’ re-reading and engagement with the novel.
The multimodal representation of character in the ‘Novel as CD-ROM’ enables the
students to ‘enter’ the text in a number of ways, through the visual display and
summaries of events, the multimodal video clips of key moments in the narrative, and
the musical narrative created via the audio clips. The students could literally ‘by-
pass’ the novel as a written entity to engage with the novel multimodally as ‘film’,
‘animation’ or ‘musical’. This offers the reader the potential for multiple reading
paths and readings of the entities novel and character. Each of the different texts
created by the movement of the students through the CD-ROM made different
aspects of character and novel as well as the different experiences of the novel
available to the reader. Further the multimodal representation of these entities in the
‘Novel as CD-ROM’ enabled the potential for the ‘high’ literary aesthetic of the
266