Playing with Picture Books

LCN617—Children’s Literature: Criticism and Practice2015. Erica Hateley – erica.hateley@qut.edu.au

Housekeeping…

• No lecture/readings for Week 6– think consolidation, and Assignment 1 (due April 2, 2015)

• After the mid-semester break, Module 2 cometh! You will need to locate your own:– Series book– Dystopian young adult (YA) novel– Non-print book (ebook, audio book, app, etc.)

• On-campus catch-up: March 21 @ 1pm, KG-R304 (I’ll also try Google Hangout—could all end in tears!)

Extending Analysis of Picture Books:

• Words & Pictures– Narrative and Narration– Moebius’s Codes

• Thematic Concerns• “Meanings” of stories, etc.

• BUT, there are a wide range of books that play with all of the conventions we’ve been thinking about, and do so in a highly self-conscious way!

The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (1989)

The postmodern text is:

(1) …iterative, driven by the compulsion to repeat, obsessed with citation and recursive narrative;

(2) it is preoccupied with aftermath, remainder, excess, fragment: indeed, it often seems to bear witness to a global catastrophe, psychological, historical or aesthetic, including the splintering of the Cartesian rational subject;

(3) it reflects a profound crisis of legitimation, including the authority of language as referent, questioning its capacity to apprehend and account for the world it both creates and confronts; visually, it also questions the organizing viewpoint of one sovereign perspective;

(4) the post-text often gravitates toward the comic mode, its slippery linguistic antics serving to undermine authority. (Flieger 89)

So: repetition, fragment, words and pictures are slippery & there’s more than one perspective, comedy can be used to make critical points.

Postmodern Picture Books?

In Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies, Cristina Bacchilega suggests that “postmodern fictions, then, hold mirrors to the magic mirror of the fairy tale, playing with its framed images out of a desire to multiply its refractions and to expose its artifices” (23).

Metafiction:self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text. (Waugh 2)

The Frog Prince, Cont. Illus. Steve Johnson. (1991)

Devices of Postmodern Picture Books:

• Nontraditional ways of using plot, character, and setting, which challenge reader expectations and require different ways of reading and viewing;

• Unusual uses of the narrator’s voice to position the reader to read the book in particular ways and through a particular character’s eyes (this can be achieved by the written or visual text);

• Indeterminacy in written or illustrative text, plot, character, or setting, which requires the reader to construct some of the text and meanings;

• A pastiche of illustrative styles, which require the reader to employ a range of knowledge and grammars to read;

• New and unusual design and layout, which challenge the reader’s perception of how to read a book;

• Contesting discourses (between the illustrative and written text), which require the reader to consider alternate readings and meaning;

• Intertextuality, which requires the reader to use background knowledge in order to access the available meanings; and

• The availability of multiple readings and meanings for a variety of audiences. (Anstey 447)

To which I would add…

• We have moved away from adventures of child characters—obvious child protagonists with whom child readers can identify—and into the realm of stories we tell to and about children, and to and about ourselves…

• Postmodern destabilising of ‘essential meaning’ or ‘essential truth’ does not lessen our very human quests for meanings or truths, and stories are one of the important ways we locate and understand such concepts.

“Scieszka and Smith have created not just a postmodern text but a postmodern book.” (Stevenson 33)

• BOOK:– Dustjacket– Endpaper/s– Title page– Contents page– Page layout & design– ISBN

• TEXT:– Pre-texts (fairy tales & nursery rhymes)– Intertextuality– Parody & Pastiche– Metafiction (telling a story about storytelling)– Narrators– Endings/“Morals”

Parsley Rabbit’s Book About Books (2007)

“Rabbit reading his book duplicates the world of readers reading Wolves, which is a book about Rabbit reading Wolves. […] Readers observe how Rabbit’s intent immersion in his book results in disruptions of textual time and space relationships. As a character in a book, Rabbit is sharing the same time and space as characters that he is reading about. Readers view Rabbit either read himself into the book or read the wolves out of the book, and this transgression of boundary creates a ‘‘convergence of two diegetic spaces’’” (Pantaleo 19)

David Wiesner…• Tom [Bodett]: […] you’re working within the picture book format

which by itself is a little rigid, isn’t it?David [Wiesner]: You know, it is and it isn’t. It’s a wonderful thing, the picture book. It’s this 32-page, sometimes more than that but it’s this set size and shape that you have to work with. There’s a title page and there’s a page where the copyright material goes, but what’s really fun is to be able to see what you can do within the confines of that format, see how far you can push it and whether there’s something new you can do with it. I enjoy the challenge of that.

Source: http://www.hmhbooks.com/authors/wiesner/interviews/inter.shtml

• For insight into how Tuesday came together, visit: http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/authors/wiesner/process/process.shtml

How do we “read”? Why do we “read”?

Discussion Prompts:• It is often claimed that picture books “got postmodern” in the

1980s. To what extent do you see the picture books we have read this week as “postmodern”?

• Do you think there are more useful ways to engage with the books critically?

• Do Moebius’s “codes” help you to read these picture books? • If you can attribute a “goal” to these books, what might they be

“doing”?• Do you think child readers are more likely to respond

enthusiastically to the picture books we have read for this week or last week’s? Why/why not?

• What kinds of reading opportunities do these books open up for readers?

Works Cited:• Anstey, Michèle. “‘It’s Not All Black and White’:

Postmodern Picture Books and New Literacies.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 45.6 (2002): 444-457.

• Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 1997.

• Flieger, Jerry Aline. “Postmodern Perspective: The Paranoid Eye.” New Literary History 28.1 (1997): 87-109.

• Pantaleo, Sylvia. “Mutinous Fiction: Narrative and Illustrative Metalepsis in Three Postmodern Picturebooks.” Children’s Literature in Education 41.1 (2010): 12-27.

• Stevenson, Deborah. “‘If You Read This Last Sentence, It Won’t Tell You Anything’: Postmodernism, Self-Referentiality, and The Stinky Cheese Man.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 19.1 (1994): 32-34.

• Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1984.