Image and Text in Advertising

A perceptible text-image plane has attracted various studies on intermediality ranging from comparison of literary texts with painting to linguistic analysis of puns and neologisms in advertising. The different media and means of communication indeed seem to share certain aspects that create the crossroad between the two poles so that they are treated more and more as an inseparable whole. This study concentrates on the common ground of literature and advertising. In literature it is the text that generates a strong visual allusion and in advertising it is mostly the visual aspect that guides the viewer’s ‘reading’. The intrinsic message of these two media is encoded on a plane where the visual and the textual elements meet. This plane can be analysed in various ways. The focus here is on two literary phenomena: figures of speech and ekphrasis. The study relies on recent magazine advertising and encompasses 20th century theatre and comics – art forms that work simultaneously with text and image. Analysis reveals that literary theory has found its way to the new media where literary elements have been given a new way of encoding.