Postmodern Picturebooks

Play, Parody, and Self-Referentiality

Lawrence R. Sipe, Sylvia Pantaleo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135897833
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Over the past 15 years, there has been a pronounced trend toward a particular type of picturebook that many would label "postmodern." Postmodern picturebooks have stretched our conventional notion of what constitutes a picturebook, as well as what it means to be an engaged reader of these texts. The international researchers and scholars included in this compelling collection of work critically examine and discuss postmodern picturebooks, and reflect upon their unique contributions to both the field of children's literature and to the development of new literacies for child, adolescent, and adult readers.

1
What is a Picturebook, Anyway?

The Evolution of Form and Substance Through the Postmodern Era and Beyond

Barbara Kiefer

So, what is a picturebook? For much of the twentieth century a picturebook was an artifact of culture that contained visual images and often words. Pictures and words were printed on paper and bound between hard board covers. Picturebooks most generally consisted of thirty-two pages of story, poem, or concept but they included endpapers, information about the book, author, artist, and publisher as well. For most of the century the picturebook was created for the enjoyment of an audience of young children with the object of engaging them in a pleasurable experience. The picturebook’s material content reflected societal norms and its physical form was the result of the printing technology available to produce and sell it.

Various scholars have explored the essence of the modern picturebook. In her historical study of American children’s picturebooks that focused mainly on the twentieth century, Barbara Bader provided an expansive definition:

A picturebook is text, illustrations, total design; an item of manufacture and a commercial product; a social, cultural, historical document; and foremost an experience for a child.

As an art form it hinges on the interdependence of pictures and words, on the simultaneous display of two facing pages, and on the drama of the turning page. (1)

Many others have built upon or extended Bader’s definition. Nodelman and Reimer classify picturebooks as forms of literature and provided a thoroughly developed scheme for how pictures provide information about stories. “Pictures can help people of all ages to understand words” (277). Nodelman also suggests that the relationship between pictures and text is always an ironic one; that is, “the words tell us what the pictures do not show, and the pictures show us what the words do not tell us” (222). Nikolajeva and Scott underscore the dual quality of images and words when they state, “The unique character of picturebooks as an art form is based on a combination of two levels of communication, the visual and the verbal” (1).

Illustrator Uri Shulevitz emphasizes the primacy of the visual art in picturebooks. He argues “A true picturebook tells a story mainly or entirely with pictures. When words are used they have an auxiliary role” (15). Marantz sees the picturebook as unique art form and argues, “picturebooks are not literature, that is, word dominated things, but rather a form of visual art. The picturebook must be experienced as a visual/ verbal entity if its potential values are to be realized” (151).

Sipe describes the relationship between text and pictures as “synergistic.” He analyzes the interplay that occurs between pictures and words in picturebooks and shows how that transaction becomes more complex as we read through the book: “Each new page opening presents us with a new set of words and new illustrations to factor into our construction of meaning” (106). Sipe also argues that “visual texts are on an equal footing with verbal texts” in this process (107).

Many of these scholarly analyses seem to imply that in picturebooks words and pictures are always present in the service of a story. If we accept Bader’s definition then we must also acknowledge many other categories of books that are generally found on shelves along with picture storybooks. These include alphabet and counting books, “toy” books, concept books, information books, and, of course, wordless books. Most important, however, is the agreement among all these scholars that images and words work in tandem and the emphasis that the picturebook is an art form rather than a teaching tool. The use of this term “art form” then leads to a second question.

WHAT IS AN ART FORM?

All these definitions seem to recognize the picturebook as an art form or object rather than utilitarian object. Suzanne Langer has argued that the arts—literature, music, drama, dance, pictorial art—evolved out of their unique potential to express meaning that discursive language is not capable of on its own. Each art form relies on symbols and structures that create meaning in different ways. To utter the statement, “War is terrible,” cannot adequately express the range of human experience of war or help us comprehend its scope. However, listening to Brahms’s A German Requiem, viewing Picasso’s Guernica, or reading Toshi Maruki’s picturebook Hiroshima No Pika, can give each of us an opportunity to know more deeply and feel more intuitively what war has meant to humanity over the centuries. Each of these art forms use different symbol systems, organized in unique ways. Picasso’s work exists on a single two- dimensional picture plane, while Brahms’s and Maruki’s works are built as we experience them over time. Our individual experience with Brahms or Picasso or Maruki’s work is unique, something magical and personal, one that will change with each encounter, “each time a little different as metaphors grow richer” (Marantz 151).

I would agree with all those cited above, that the picturebook is first and foremost an art object. Most broadly it is the combination of image and idea presented in sequence whose creation is grounded in three ways. An artist creates the art object for an audience. Over our human history the artist, the audience, and the object have been influenced by society, culture and technology. What has stayed constant is that an aesthetic experience arises from images and ideas combined in some complete form when an audience brings to it intellectual and emotional understandings.

THE FIRST PICTUREBOOKS

If we accept this idea of the picturebook as one in which participants engage both intellectual and emotional resources with a visual/verbal art form, I believe we can trace the first picturebooks back thousands of years. Rock paintings in the Chauvet Pont de Arc caves in southern France date back at least thirty thousand years, and similar paintings have been found throughout the world. Although the cave paintings do not resemble today’s picturebook, they may represent a similar aesthetic process. Using the products of technology available (there was of course no paper, no written alphabet, no printing presses or book binderies), an artist created a visual form that was probably shared with an audience in some ritualistic way, accompanied by a story told or by chants sung.

The paintings were possibly a result of a cultural need—the need to represent through image and myth the basic aspects of survival of the individual and the race. The rituals surrounding the cave paintings were probably social (Campbell 311). Campbell speculates that the paintings were not experienced in solitary but as part of a group ceremony and interaction. There is reason to believe that these “stories” were retold again and again, for, in places, the images are painted on top of earlier images indicating a repeated “reading” or reexperiencing of the art form. Thus, these technological, cultural and social underpinnings provide the basis throughout history for the individual’s response to image and idea now found in the picturebook.

FROM CAVE WALLS TO PAPYRUS SCROLLS

As a result of the development of written systems around 4100–3800 BCE, we begin to find objects that more closely resemble today’s picturebooks and we can understand their form, function, and audience more precisely. The first objects that had the attributes associated with a modern picturebook emerged in Egypt around 2700 BCE. Around this time people of the Mesopotamian region were using marks pressed into wet clay, and the Chinese were writing on long strips of bamboo or wood. In Egypt, the development of papyrus, made from stems of a plant that grew along the Nile River, provided a technological advance that gave the Egyptians an advantage over other Middle and Far Eastern societies. The papyrus scrolls were much more easily transported and stored than the unwieldy wood or clay tablets, and were nonperishable in the dry desert climate. The availability of papyrus scrolls, and cultural tradition of Egyptian visual art, led to an art form that combined written language with pictorial images.

These papyruses, especially those referred to as the Book of the Dead, combined pictorial image and verbal story. On many of these scrolls, the pictorial images are predominant while the words are part of the overall composition and are pleasingly balanced and integrated with the images. The scrolls are meant to be read in a sequence rather than viewed as a single entity thus allowing, just as with modern picturebooks, for an aesthetic experience that evolved in sequence over time. The placement of pictures and words is remarkably similar to what we see in today’s picturebooks. Often what appears to be a decorative border accompanies the central scene, anticipating the beautifully designed borders of the illuminated books of the Middle Ages or the modern-day picturebooks of artists such as Jan Brett or Trina Schart Hyman. The subjects of these scrolls were often religious; they were meant as a guide into the world after death. However, enough material has survived the great fires in the library at Alexandria to suggest that animal fables, astronomy, magic, satire, and erotica also provided the content for papyrus scrolls.

A NEW BOOK FORM

Around the first century CE a new technological invention, the codex, changed the picturebook into the form we still have today. Based on the multi-leaved clay tablets used in Greece and Rome at the time, this technique allowed bookmakers to cut pieces of papyrus or parchment into sheets, which were folded and sewn together in the fold, then bound with thin pieces of wood covered with leather. The codex was much easier to use than scrolls. It allowed both sides of the page to be used thus saving space. It also made it easier for the readers to find specific places in a text more quickly. Moreover, the codex changed layout and design in books. A full-page, framed illustration—sometimes alone, sometimes facing a page of printed text—was the result of this form. The invention of the codex, according to Harthan, “affected book production as profoundly and permanently as did the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century” (12).

The codex also allowed a wider range of style and media to be used in the illustrations. Since layers of paint would crack when rolled and unrolled, rolled scrolls were executed mostly with line drawings. In addition, papyrus rapidly disintegrated in the Mediterranean climate beyond Egypt. As the new codex form moved north and west papyrus was replaced by parchment or vellum, made of animal skins. The codex form and the parchment page made possible the use of rich colors, including gold, for illustrations.

It should be noted that following the development of the codex, today’s picturebooks evolved out of the European traditions. However, the combination of image and idea developed in other cultures as well, from China to South America to the Middle East. As it did in Europe, the book form became central to Islam. However, religious strictures of Islam led to the development of the art of calligraphy and decoration rather than of imagery. Therefore, although the decorative forms of Islamic art might influence Western traditions, the art of pictorial story telling was nurtured by societal and cultural norms of European cultures.

In the West, as the Roman Empire drew to a close, the picturebook form survived due to the needs and husbandry of the Christian Church which preserved the book form through the Dark Ages. One of the Church’s purposes was to further the spread of Christianity and to convert pagans by spreading the Christian message. Because each book was created by hand, the Church became responsible for creating copies of the religious documents that could be sent through the developing Christian world. Visual imagery in these manuscripts was important for several reasons. The vast majority of new converts were illiterate. Visual images in sacred books allowed a universal reading of the Christian message. In addition, these books were meant to inspire religious awe among new converts. Thus, the combination of image and word became an essential form of art in the Christian world.

For some time styles of book illustration developed in two major European centers. In the Byzantine Empire, books relied on Greco-Roman style, which gradually merged into the stylistic, uniform pictorial symbols of early Christian art. During this same time, book illustration in England and Ireland evolved in an independent school, called insular. These insular manuscripts reflected styles and motifs of Celtic art that survived in the Bri...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Education
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 What is a Picturebook, Anyway?
• 2 The Artist and the Postmodern Picturebook
• 3 Radical Change Theory, Postmodernism, and Contemporary Picturebooks
• 4 Play and Playfulness in Postmodern Picturebooks
• 5 Postmodern Picturebooks and the Transmodern Self
• 6 “They are Always Surprised at What People Throw Away”
• 7 Postmodern Picturebooks and the Material Conditions of Reading
• 8 The Paradox of Space in Postmodern Picturebooks
• 9 Imagination and Multimodality
• 10 Postmodern Picturebook as Artefact
• 11 Lauren Child
• 12 Would I Lie to You?
• 13 “It Doesn’t Say How?”
• 14 The Voices Behind the Pictures
• 15 First Graders Interpret David Wiesner’s The Three Pigs
• 16 Ed Vere’s The Getaway
• Contributors
• Index