Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The interests of linguists centered on word formation and sentence structure roles in communicating messages for a long time. Then, the development in the modern media age led to the use of different techniques that aided the writing system. Images are of those newly developed techniques. Telling a story through images or mixing both images and sentences are used widely nowadays. This paper uses a methodological framework based on Gunther Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) Reading images, the grammar of visual design approach to analyze Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer. Migration and refugee stories are still key issues these days since many works of art tackle their stories in different ways. Sea Prayer, a novel, narrates a refugee story in a multimodal way through mixing both images and sentences. The paper discloses how far the visual images assisted literal expressions in such a multimodal work of art.