Graphic trinities: languages, literature, and words-in-pictures in Shaun Tan’sThe Arrival

This article brings together semiotics and literary theory, and notes the intrinsic and historical connectedness between words and images. It discusses the ‘language’ of Shaun Tan’s graphic novel The Arrival and describes the use of traditional language as illustration, and the use of image as language. In doing so, it notes the work of the Russian theorist Bakhtin on the chronotope, and the related idea, developed by the author of this article, of the visual chronotope as a tool of semiotic analysis.