Session 2: Across Visual Lines
3rd Global Conference
Tuesday 14th July 2009 – Thursday 16th July 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Reading the Contemporary Picture Book: Negotiating Change
Bev Croker
University of New England, Armidale, Australia
In this multimedia world, technology has challenged the place of the book and, indeed, the way in which we might read texts. The digital culture has provided opportunities for radical changes in books for children and adolescents. In particular, one form of multimodal text, the picturebook, provides enormous challenges in its capacity for what Lewis calls an ‘endless metamorphosis’ (2001: 136). Its intended audience has expanded to embrace young adults as well as younger readers. The picturebook constantly borrows and exploits genres and manipulates interanimation of word and image. Its flexibility means that it has the ability to respond to social and cultural changes and technological developments. In particular, the very nature of the picturebook allows for the incorporation of electronic modes of expression in both obvious and subtle ways.
The diversity provided by print and electronic versions of picturebooks has led to changes in reader expectations ‘where communication in this digital culture is marked by the interactivity, immediacy and complexity of both image and text’ (Unsworth 2005: 6).
This paper explores ways in which educators might respond to these changes and draw on this interactivity and provide new navigation skills to allow the reader to engage with such texts in the twenty- first century. Recent research has emphasized an examining of picturebooks through a visual literacy framework, with a focus on function and form where tools are developed for meaning-making. Yet, if picturebooks provide, as Lewis suggests, opportunities for readers to not only absorb but interpret and re-present, then an understanding of picturebooks as literature is also significant. This paper searches for a rigorous approach that would allow the reader what Leavis calls ‘a power … of creative response to the new challenges of time’ (Leavis 1962:27).
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Voices in the Dark: Unpacking ‘Twilight’ through the Facets of Visual Paratext
Phil Fitzsimmons
Director Fiji Professional Experience, and Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong, Australia
No abstract is presently available
Thinking and Talking with Alice
Kerrie McCaw
University of Ballarat, Australia
This paper will examine an intricate journey that involves an interdisciplinary approach to visual culture. The ‘Alice’ novels of Lewis Carroll are used as a vehicle for exploration because of their thematic concerns and the way in which those concerns have been interpreted and disseminated in visual culture. The Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass books written by Carroll and illustrated by John Tenniel first published in 1865 and 1871 respectively, have provided an ongoing conversation with artists. Through Tenniel’s illustrations, this conversation may be seen to reach back to Leonardo Da Vinci, as well as reaching forward through modernism, post-modernism and on to current art practices. The intention of this paper is to examine the use of Carroll’s text and Tenniel’s illustrations as reference material for visual artists, with particular focus on a dialogue created with Australian contemporary art practitioners and the ‘Alice’ stories. This enquiry is longitudinal, by means of both a subjective, personal practice- based research method that converses with the text and illustrations, and by an examination of relevant literature. Such an exploration is employed in order to highlight the broader ramifications of the use of historical material and memory through a kind of cultural archaeology. These Victorian era children’s novels then become a site for examining artistic practice and its place in twenty first century Australian culture.
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