Beyond the Alphabetic: Using William Blake's The Tyger as a Way to Teach Modal Affordances

Abstract

Scholars and teachers often focus only on alphabetic texts in the classroom (Palmeri; Alexander and Rhodes; Jewitt; Selfe; Shipka); however, we do our students a disservice if we do not prepare them to compose with and understand the rhetorical consequences of using a variety of modes. In this article, I argue that we need to teach our students to be critically aware of the affordances of each mode as well as the ways in which those affordances affect communication. With this in mind, I offer an example introductory assignment using William Blake's "The Tyger" to help students gain a critical awareness of modal affordances. Utilizing Blakes poem, three versions of his etching, a choral version of the poem, and YouTube video of a dramatic reading of the poem, I analyze the ways in which meaning making is affected by changes in and juxtaposition of different modes. I suggest that this same kind of analysis could be conducted with students, helping them discover how different multimodal texts lead to different meanings and consider how the meanings could have been made clearer or made different.