Beyond Words - by Wolfgang Stadler & Paul Mayr (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book provides a comprehensive and multidimensional understanding of silence in both auditory and visual communication, and across a wide range of languages and cultures. The chapters explore silence from literary, semiotic and cultural perspectives.

Book Synopsis

Explores silence in its philological dimensions: as a vehicle of meaning, a narrative device and a medium for expressing or concealing emotion.

This book explores how silence occurs across languages, literatures, and cultures, fulfilling a wide range of communicative functions. It examines how silence can be collective or individual, intentional or unintentional, conveying meanings that extend beyond words and shaping interaction, perception and expression.

The volume investigates the multifaceted nature of silence from literary, semiotic, and cultural perspectives, weaving together analyses that reveal its complexity across different media and contexts. The chapters address silences both within and beyond interaction, including interaction-like contexts, encompassing such diverse phenomena as animal silence, the silence of trauma, and the iconic phase of silence.

Taken together, the contributions provide a comprehensive and multidimensional understanding of silence in auditory and visual forms of expression, and across varied linguistic and cultural contexts.

About the Author

Wolfgang Stadler is Professor Emeritus of Russian (applied) linguistics and subject-specific language education and a former Dean of the Faculty of Education at Innsbruck University, Austria.

Paul Mayr is a Research Associate in Romance linguistics at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.