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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Le récitatif entre espace périphérique et décrochage déictique du texte

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description

This article explores the issues at stakes in defining the narrative caption. As a starting point, it reviews usual definitions which combine a functional component (the caption provides a certain kind of information), a graphic component (that characterizes it as a space) and an enunciative component (the text which conveys the narrator’s voice) are combined. The article distingues between two objects: on the one hand the text box as a peripheral space in relation to the panel, on the other hand the caption as a textual element. In order to avoid the disputed concept of narrator and to include a wider set of texts, the caption as a text is defined by its lack of deictic anchoring in the image. Examples of atypical texts employed as captions in Watchmen illustrate this alternative definition’s value for analysis. The distinction between two objects, box (space) and caption (text), usually combined and complementary, finally allows us to explore in Building Stories a few cases of non coincidence between text types and space types : the conceptual distinction will allow an easier description of these cases.