irony
Visual Narrativity in the Picture Book
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Wesseling, Elisabeth. “Visual Narrativity in the Picture Book: Heinrich Hoffman’s Der Struwwelpeter.” Children’s Literature in Education 35.4 (Dec. 2004): 319–45.
Referrer: Carrie Hintz
Categories: visual story telling, picturebooks, color theory, image/text, irony, layout
Annotation:
Wesseling immediately argues, “Both words and images make their own relatively autonomous contribution to the overall semantic, aesthetic and emotional effect of the picture book. Therefore, it has often been observed that the picture book is closer to other mixed narrative forms such as drama or film than to verbal fiction.” Channeling Nodelman, Wesseling dives into a reading of Der Struwwelpeter, oder lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder that is focused on word and image interaction. This close reading of the text and images garners observations regarding the representations, visual storytelling, and textual augmentation of the illustrations. The construction and layout of pages in relation to rhyming is discussed and categorized as Visual Rhymes. This abstract perspective on visual structure is valuable for thinking about the implications of layout in distant reading picturebooks.
Metalinguistic Awareness and the Child’s Developing Concept of Irony
On 20, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Kummerling-Meibauer, Bettina. “Metalinguistic Awareness and the Child’s Developing Concept of Irony: The Relationship between Pictures and Text in Ironic Picture Books.” The Lion and the Unicorn 23.2 (Apr. 1999): 157–83.
Referrer: Carrie Hintz
Categories: picturebook, visual storytelling, semantics, metalinguistic awareness, nonliteral language, irony
Annotation:
The pictorial and textual elements of ironic narratives, more specifically picture books, is different than that of regular literary examples. Children have difficulty understanding irony. The ability to detect and understand nonliteral language has been coined “metalinguistic awareness.” Kummerling-Meibauer states that it is an accepted understanding that young children have the ability to foster this type of understanding when reading picture books. To Kummerling-Meibauer, there are four key patterns associated with this phenomenon: “semantic gap, contrast in artistic style, change in point of view, and sequential structure.” The relationship between text and illustration to infer meaning is explored in depth here.
