A Picture Book about War as a Cultural Artifact with a Political Potential. Case Study
Abstract
In the article, I provide a case study of the book by Ukrainian artists: Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv entitled Війна, щозміниларондо (How War Changed Rondo), originally published in 2015 in Lviv, using the Critical Content Analysis approach and secondary data analysis. The book, which is a part of a larger socio-historical-cultural-political context (Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), is what I consider to be a cultural text (artifact) with political significance and the voice in the information warfare. Historicism and postcolonialism (in Mykola Riabchuk’s version) are the theoretical perspectives for the investigation and interpretation of meanings generated by the book in a multimodal manner (by means of image and text, and the interaction between them) and by its epitexts. The research reveals that, in the imperial discourse, this picture book is a vivid example of the ambivalence between the voice of Ukrainian freedom from Russian cultural control and, at the same time, it reflects the trend of Western universalism.
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