New Directions in Picturebook Research

Teresa Colomer, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Cecilia Silva-Díaz, Teresa Colomer, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Cecilia Silva-Díaz

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136882777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this new collection, children's literature scholars from twelve different countries contribute to the ongoing debate on the importance of picturebook research, focusing on aesthetic and cognitive aspects of picture books. Contributors take interdisciplinary approaches that integrate different disciplines such as literary studies, art history, linguistics, narratology, cognitive psychology, sociology, memory studies, and picture theory. Topics discussed include intervisuality, twist endings, autobiographical narration, and metaliterary awareness in picturebooks. The essays also examine the narrative challenges of first-person narratives, ellipsis, and frame-breaking in order to consider the importance of mindscape as a new paradigm in picturebook research. Tying picturebook studies to studies in childhood, multimodality, and literacy, this anthology is a representative of the different opportunities for research in this emerging field.

Part I
Picturebooks, Literacy, and Cultural Context

Chapter One
Words Claimed

Picturebook Narratives and the Project of Children’s Literature

Perry Nodelman

There are many kinds of children’s literature. There are novels, stories, poems, and plays. There are texts of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and adventure. There are domestic stories and stories about animals and stories of life in the wilds. And so on and so on. But as the adaptation theories popular with German and Scandinavian children’s literature theorists suggest, the children’s texts of these sorts have clear connections with the adult ones that, usually, pre-existed them. As Torben Weinreich says, “Writers do not primarily adapt because children have other experiences and other knowledge, but because they lack experience and knowledge” (49)—and so, many conclude, children’s literature can best be understood as consisting of adapted—i.e., usually, simplified—versions of adult literary forms.

But if that is true, then what about picturebooks? The mere fact that they exist makes adaptation theories problematic, simply because there is no equivalent adult form of literature to understand them as adaptations of. Picturebooks either predated or began to be produced around the same time as related forms of literature for adults that combine visual and verbal texts: comic books, graphic novels, newspapers and magazines with lots of photos and drawings in them, coffee-table texts of non-fiction. The picturebook is, I believe, the one form of literature invented specifically for audiences of children—and despite recent claims for a growing adult audience for more sophisticated books, ¹ the picturebook remains firmly connected to the idea of an implied child-reader/viewer.

It strikes me, then, that the mere existence of the picturebook and its continuing popularity as the main form of literature produced for young people before they begin to read and in their early experiences of reading on their own might help us to understand a lot about children’s literature generally: what it is, why it exists, why it takes the forms it does. Rather than being an exception to adaptation theory, in fact, it might throw it into question altogether.

I have to be honest and say I hope it does. I spent some years working on a book on the distinguishing characteristics of children literature—published as The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature in 2008. A key assumption of my book is that texts written for children and young adults—indeed, any texts written for an audience understood as being younger than their writers in a central and important way—tend to share characteristic structural and narrative features that make them less adaptive than distinct. Like Weinreich, “I prefer to see children’s literature as a genre and by ‘genre’ I mean here a notion of a group of texts characterised by recurrent features” (34). As it happens, furthermore, I believe those recurrent features are most clearly visible in picturebooks. The one kind of narrative invented specifically for children might then represent the formal characteristics of children’s literature in their most essential and characteristic form, and thus reveal its underpinnings and implications in a particularly explicit way. In what follows, I consider how the form and structure conventional to the picturebook narrative represent what the project of children’s literature essentially is, in order to open some questions about the validity of that project.

So let’s begin with the most obvious question: why picturebooks? What is it about the way adults have conventionally thought about children in the last century or so that has made the production of picturebooks so central to the children’s literature industry world-wide?

Well, what distinguishes picturebooks from other texts is exactly what their name suggests: the presence of pictures. They have pictures because children, people believe, need or are at least greatly benefited by their presence. Without pictures, people think, children cannot make much sense of words.

But perhaps that is just because the words are so simple that they do not make much sense on their own anyway. Consider the pictures in books for the youngest children—the kind of books that offer images accompanied by one-word labels—“apple,” “ball,” “tree,” etc. On its own, the word “tree” says little. It names an object—but why? Why is the word being said, or written down? Or even more problematic, for those not yet familiar with the language, for foreigners or very young children—what does “tree” mean anyway? We need to know what object this particular conformation of sounds represents before we can even begin to think about why it has been named.

Once a picture is present, however, the answer becomes clearer: the word is there in order to be associated with the object it represents. This word— “tree”—represents this thing you see here. And once that is clear, the reason for “tree” being uttered is also clear—it is being defined. This is a situation a lot like a dictionary, except that the many words that account for and explain one word in the definitions there are replaced by a picture. The picture would not be necessary if a lot of other words—the kind of words we find in dictionary definitions—were there. ² But they are not there. They cannot be there because we believe they are too complicated for the young readers implied as the audience for this sort of book. So they have been replaced by an image.

If we stop just taking this for granted as an obvious thing to do, we can see that it is really pretty strange. There are a number of paradoxes here.

First: simple words, it turns out, are complicated—too complicated, it seems, too mysterious and uncertain, to stand on their own without the support of the picture. Their simplicity makes them difficult. There are two reasons for that. First, written words are what are known as arbitrary signs: they look nothing like the things they represent. ³ Just as someone unfamiliar with, say, Chinese, could not figure out what object a Chinese word might represent merely by looking at the word

, English speakers who cannot read English cannot figure out that the letters T R E E represent the sound “tree,” which represents a certain kind of large plant. So—ironically, perhaps—they cannot figure out a presumably very simple verbal text.

The second reason simple words are difficult is that words always exist and take their meaning within a complex network of other words. The sound “tree” on its own means nothing in particular. “Tree” in relation to a lot of other words—not just its dictionary definition, but also words like “nature,” “seed,” “flower,” “people,” “soil,” “sky,” “growth,” “spring,” “branch,” and so on—has a quite specific meaning. Its meaning emerges from its relationships with the meanings of all those other words. ⁴

But only for someone who knows those other words—or if, as in a dictionary, some of those other words are there to explain the first word. In a simple book for young children, those other words are not there—are not there, ironically, because adults assume young readers will not be able to read them or, if adults speak the words, child listeners will not understand them. This is, in fact, exactly why children’s literature exists in the first place: because adults assume children are capable of understanding less than adults—or perhaps because adults want children to understand less, want them not to know certain aspects of the world—children need a literature that says less.

Paradoxically, however, the absence of complicated words makes the simpler words left behind incomplete, mysterious—complicated. At which point, enter pictures. As I have suggested, the picture of the tree is there in place of all the more complex words that might help communicate what the word “tree” signifies. Adults tend to assume that a young person who could not make sense of all those complex words could in fact make sense of a picture. As a system of representation, pictures are, clearly, less arbitrary than words are. They are the kind of sign known as “iconic”—i.e., they do in some ways resemble the objects they represent. The letters T R E E do not look like a tree. A picture of a tree does.

Or rather, sort of does. Unlike the trees seen even in what most people might consider a very realistic photograph, real trees are significantly larger; have a third dimension, not just two; move and make sounds in the wind rather than being fixed in one place and eternally silent. The trees shown in the simplified outline drawings found in many books for very young children are even more unlike real ones—they tend to have fewer colors and textures, and often exist in a void, not even attached to any depiction of the ground. Even so, people tend to assume that even the very youngest of children can derive the idea of a tree from exactly these kinds of pictures of one. The images that appear in books for the youngest and least experienced readers are either ones that have been simplified to provide a minimal amount of information of how an object looks—simple outline drawings, for instance—or else, they are complexly detailed color photographs that provide enough of that sort of information to seem to be as accurately “realistic” as possible.

The first of these possibilities is interesting because it duplicates the original problem with simple words that it is meant to solve. It provides more information to make up for the absence of more words, but offers very little of that information, and assumes an ability to read more into it—to see the complex tree in the simple outline.

Even so, there is logic to support this—research in picture perception suggests that outline drawings seem to be comprehensible by all sorts of untrained people, including very young children previously unfamiliar with pictures. ⁵ And in any case, even a simple outline picture tends to imply more information that just the word itself. It is not just a tree, but, perhaps, a green tree, a fir tree—always a particular sort and size and shape of tree. There is more information than necessary. The word “tree” can refer to any and all trees. But any picture of a tree, no matter how representative of all trees it is meant to be, can depict nothing more than just one particular tree—never just the idea of “tree,” always just one specific example to represent that idea.

And it always does so more exactly, in a more specific way than just the word itself. Because pictures are, in fact, less arbitrary, easier to understand than words, it seems safe to assume that that extra information will not confuse or upset young viewers. Certainly, the pictures in books for young people do tend to provide a lot more information than a simple text might seem to require. Consider this text:

Here’s something good about kindergarten. Getting a turn on the swing. Amber swings high. Her toes reach for the roof of the school. She’s almost flying.

The picture accompanying that text, Canadian illustrator Kady Macdonald Denton’s illustration for Canadian author Nan Gregory’s Amber Waiting, is drawn in a very simple style, and has little in the way of background detail. Nevertheless, its excess information includes what Amber looks like, what color her hair is, approximately how old she is, what she is wearing and how that signifies her class and country and lifestyle, the cultural and genetic background of her classmates and herself, the fact that Amber is not alone but with and interacting with others, the existence of other objects in the schoolyard beside the swing, the fact that she is really not reaching the roof or flying as the text claims, the time of year (there is snow on the ground, but no heavy coats, so in Canada that means it’s likely to be late fall or early spring). And so on. The picture tells viewers a lot more than the text manages to say, or that adults would allow it to say in the context of a children’s picturebook.

There is a paradox here. The more detailed words get—the closer they get to being an accurate and complete description of an event or an object—the less child-appropriate adults tend to assume they are. But the more complete and detailed a picture is—the closer it comes to what we conventionally call realistic—then the more appropriate we tend to assume it is for children. A clear, detailed photograph is likely to seem ideal in these circumstances, and I suspect fewer people would imagine young c...

Table of contents

• Children’s Literature and Culture
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Permissions
• Introduction
• Part I Picturebooks, Literacy, and Cultural Context
• Part II Picturebooks and Storytelling
• Part III Making Sense Out of Picturebooks
• Contributors
• Selected Bibliography
• Index