Chapter 4. Multimodal realisations of mind style in Enduring Love

Mind style is the term traditionally discussed in stylistics to refer to the linguistic features that project the peculiarities of characters’ cognitive make-up. As stylistics mainly focuses on written forms, mind style has generally been discussed in relation to its textual manifestations although new research is emerging which is redressing this lack (Gibbons 2010; Nørgaard 2010). When considering textual forms, scholars identify many and varied linguistic indicators as markers of mind style. In this chapter I look into the way both verbal and multimodal markers are exploited in Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love (1997) and its homonymous cinematic adaptation by Roger Michell (2004) to create particular mind styles. This chapter argues that tools traditionally discussed in stylistics can shed light on the way multimodal discourse functions and also that the inclusion of multimodal formats can refine existing stylistic frameworks and models.