Looking and Reading: Verbal-Visuality from a Dialogical Perspective

Abstract

This article contributes to the ongoing research on Bakhtin and the Circle’s possible contribution to the reading, the analysis and the interpretation of different modes of meaning production and meaning effect from texts whose main mark is the constitutive verbal-visual relation, that is, the articulation between the linguistic dimension – whether oral or written – and the image. If separate studies on the verbal dimension or the visual dimension have a long and respectful tradition in several knowledge areas, currently presenting expressive and rigorous studies, the verbal-visual language condition also stands in a place of privilege today as a recurrent social, cultural and discursive production and, thus, as a study object per se. Therefore, this article aims to focus on some texts from different genres, stemming from different spheres, in which the verbal-visual articulation, woven in the instance of production, deliberately works as a project of meaning production and meaning effect, be it logical, ideological, emotional or otherwise, interwoven by a face-to-face dialogue in which confronted otherness summons for subject and object memories, promoting new identities.