Multimodal Creativity in (Anti)Tourism Texts

This paper argues and seeks to demonstrate that the tourist-travel dichotomy traces a debatable and contestable discursive space, often articulated via anti-tourism stances. This notion is epitomized in innovative and creative multimodal domain-specific texts, whose generic configurations transcend traditional boundaries and question stable and rigid conceptual and generic distinctions. Such instances consistently occupy an increasingly hybrid, blurred and opaque contact zone, which needs to be explored with a relevant and appropriate methodology. Acknowledging the crucial role of multimodality in processes of genre change and innovation, the feasibility of multimodal analysis for tourism-travel text examination is here claimed. Hence, the meaning-making contact and interaction of different modes and modal resources will be inspected in three creative instances,: a static poster, a dynamic digital travel diary and a website. All texts have been chosen as they provide evidence of multimodally projected creative (anti)tourism discourse. The following questions will be raised. Which modes and modal resources are deployed in the multimodal ensembles? How do they interact? Which meanings do they express? Albeit differently in terms of syntagmatic and paradigmatic configurations, the three texts multimodally project an (anti)tourism discourse with ultimate tourist purposes, inviting viewers to visit the destination or to book the accommodation option.