The benefits of narratology in the analysis of multimodal legitimation
What is it about?
This article focuses on the multimodal discourse of three political advertisements of the political party New Democracy, filmed for the needs of the Greek legislative election of January 2015. What is investigated is the multimodal means by which New Democracy’s president, and Prime Minister at the time, Antonis Samaras attempted to legitimise his candidacy.
Why is it important?
This study is important for two reasons. First, in spite of a big number of studies on legitimation, multimodality and political discourse, multimodal legitimation research seems to be in need of a better conflation of the theoretical backgrounds of disciplines, such as narratology. In this article, I borrow Mackay’s (2015) framework for multimodal legitimation analysis and suggest its expansion by including the investigation of perspective (or focalisation) as an indispensable part of multimodal legitimation, and I argue that the inclusion of narratology’s terms can equip the researchers with analytical categories that can provide terminological accuracy and more rigorous analyses. The second reason why this study is important is related to the types of data that have been analysed by previous researchers investigating discourses on/during the so-called 'Greek crisis'. The genre of political electoral) advertisements has been under-investigated so far and this article aims to contribute towards filling this gap.