Reading tourism texts: A multimodal analysis

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Book Reviews / Annals of Tourism Research 50 (2015) 173–181

Reading tourism texts: A multimodal analysis By Sabrina Francesconi. Channel View Publications , 2014, xxxviii + 162 pp. (glossary, bibliography, references, author index), £29.95, Pbk. ISBN: 978-1-84541-426-9. Tourism is a pervasive phenomenon, and one that is discursively constructed through a variety of means in our everyday lives: newspaper articles and advertisements featuring destinations, television and radio programmes, digital tourist pictures on social media, or discussions with friends and family. Communication about tourism has evolved rapidly in the digital age, and is now instant and global in its reach. Traditional tourism brochures and postcards have been joined by mobile phone apps, blogs, and Wikitravel. Likewise, their physical format is also evolving from static to dynamic and multimodal. In her book, Reading Tourism Texts, Francesconi proposes multimodal analysis as the best framework for examining tourism discourse within this increasing variety of texts. Chapter 1 explores tourism texts through the lens of genre analysis, and provides a hierarchical framework for genre maps and colonies. Various textual media are examined—Francesconi argues that these encompass not only the more obvious written, verbal, and aural texts but also souvenirs and items of travel memorabilia such as shells, stones, and art. She then goes on to illustrate genre innovation and hybridisation through an examination of a Wikitravel page. In the second chapter, Francesconi discusses the theory and methodological framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), whereby language is broken down into its grammatical components in order to extract meaning-making. She provides examples for the three metafunctions (ideational, interpersonal, and textual) that govern how the meaning of language is expressed. The SFL model is then applied to two genres of tourism texts (a promotional brochure and a personal travel blog) to illustrate the differences in communication function, form, and style. Visual analysis is the focus of Chapter 3, beginning with a short discussion of the history of images and visual text, and of the scholarly thought that accompanies it—noting in particular the central role of visual culture in travel and tourism texts. Indeed, she states that ‘‘travel not only equals seeing, but also showing that one has seen’’ (p. 76). Urry’s concept of the tourist gaze is then unpacked with regards to visual tourism texts and tourism communications. Next, the SFL model is applied to the analysis of a series of promotional images of Ireland. Francesconi uses the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions to make visible the underlying ideologies and attitudes. The analysis would have been enhanced in many ways had colour images been used, particularly when discussing the importance of colour saturation, differentiation and modulation, but her general argument could be comprehended. The summary tables (pages 100–102) presenting the elements of visual semiosis in the promotional images were very clear and especially useful, as the descriptions of the analysis in the text were at times quite confusing. Aural communication in tourism texts is addressed in Chapter 4. This encompasses not only human voice, but other forms of sound as well such as music used in tourism advertising on television and radio. Francesconi notes the lack of acknowledgement of the auditory dimension in much tourism research, and provides two examples analysing different audio genres—a radio travel program and a radio commercial. The final chapter deals with multimodal and intermodal analysis, with examples portraying intersemiosis in static, dynamic, and hypertextual texts. As a treatise on tourism analysis, this book serves as a timely reminder that tourism and travel texts are multimodal in nature. As such, the visual and aural dimensions of tourism communication are important and must be considered alongside the more commonly researched written texts. However, the author’s academic specialisation in linguistics is highly apparent, and this, along with the choice of font and style of formatting makes for very dense reading. The back cover claims that researchers and students in the field of tourism will find it a useful text, but unless one has something of an understanding of applied linguistics, this may be overly optimistic, and those seeking a methods ‘‘how-to’’ guide may be disappointed. Nevertheless, the book contains a comprehensive and useful bibliography of critical works on the language of tourism, organised by genre, which will provide a valuable starting point when searching for research dealing with analysis of tourism texts. Genres

Book Reviews / Annals of Tourism Research 50 (2015) 173–181

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include blogs, CDs, performance, magazines, brochures, guides, postcards, souvenirs, television programmes, pictures, and websites. Trudie Walters Department of Tourism, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand Tel.: +64 3 479 8197. E-mail address: [email protected] Received 4 May 2014; Revised 2 June 2014; Accepted 16 June 2014 Available online 26 November 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2014.11.007