Film titles and literary titles: analysis of threshold items in different modes of communication

Literary titles have been widely analysed by scholars in different fields such as literature (Genette, 1987), linguistics (Viezzi, 2004), and genre studies (Gesuato, 2005), whereas film titles have so far received less attention, at least from a semiotic and multimodal standpoint. This paper is thus meant to identify some commonalities and dissimilarities between the two types of titles, including the prominently multimodal nature of the latter vis-à-vis the former. Thus, in the first part of this paper, I investigate how film titles come to have different features as compared with literary titles, and in what ways the entitling act is different. In the second part, I consider how film and literary titles are translated from English into Italian, and how different translations of titles typically alter the network of intratextual and intertextual references, a process which obviously affects translation from, and into, other languages.