Christophe MEUNIER
Centre de Formation – Site de Tours
Université d’Orléans
PhD Student in Geography
ENS-LSH de Lyon
UMR 5600 Environnement, Ville et Société
International Conference at Stockholm University
13th-15th September 2013
Text, image, ideology – Picturebooks as meetingplaces
Proposal:
A Cultural Geographic object: The Children’s Picturebook
Actor of spatialities / Generator of spaces
Abstract :
“Children’s books are not used to introduce their readers directly to the world of objects, animals and human beings, in what we call Life. Rather, if something like the Platonist anamnesis exists, it takes place in the children themselves, whose book of concretized pictures is Paradise”
Walter Benjamin,Eloge de la poupée et autres essais (1918-1921), 2011, Paris : Payot, pp.53-56.
Mindful ofwhat Walter Bejamin’s view expressedin the above in 1918, I will assert that children’s picture books are more than vectors of imagination. Thanks to the narrative created by text and pictures, picture books generate spaces. Such spaces I will call transactions and transfers. It is these spaces that contribute to the construction of the young readers’ modus habitandi.The hypotheses that form the foundation of the terms, transactions and transfers, constitute the two main axes of a research I began two years ago in Geography.
On one hand, children’s picture books achieve these spaces by the different movements that the authors impose on their characters and consequently such books create limited, socialized and deeply ideologized spaces that geographers call territories. I would like to demonstrate that space and spatiality take sense and their origin in picture books through a “narrative course”.Characters move inside spaces created both by pictures and text that have beenconstructedfrom individual and social perceptions. Sometimes, some perceptions of territories could be labeled “clichés”. However, I regard them more as archetypes. These archetypes are in keeping with what the anthropologist Yves Winkin calls Enchantment, which he defines as “hedonism of the uncontrollable everyday life”[1]?They constitute the product of a voluntary illusion, a denial of economic realities.
On the other hand, a major part of my research leans towards exploring the reception of picture books by children and especially the possibilities of transmission of spatialities. According to Roger M. Downs, spatial behavior is linked to the image that human beings receive from their environment. This image “represents the link between man and his environment”[2]. Thanks to the picture books, this very special and iconotextual object, authors are able to transmit certain ways of living and moving in space, giving their own perceptions of spatialities. The interdependence between text, pictures and the medium can express both space and its relations with a society.
I would like to study not only the possibilities of transmission but also how picture books are able to change children’s perceptions by mean of what I call transfer and thus help them to build their own modus habitandi.
[1] Yves Winkin, Anthropologie de la communication. De la théorie au terrain, De Boeck, 1996, pp.214-216.
[2]Roger M. Downs, «geographic space perception: past approaches and future prospects» in C. Board, R. Choley, P. Haggett, P. Stoddard (dir.),Progress in Human Geography, London : Ed. Arnold, vol.2, 1970,p.70.