Are Wordless Books Democratic?
Abstract
This article aims to examine the wordless picturebooks in the light of changes in culturally conditioned communication methods (especially according to children with adult reading companions), as well as changes in the perception of implied readers. The author starts by discussing the ‘Silent Books: from the World to Lampedusa and Back’ project, initiated ten years ago by IBBY, and analyzing the project’s assumptions, which deal with a democratic narrative transmitted by the images. In the next section, the author considers the status of the recipient of a wordless picture book, the significance of adult reading companions, and the phenomena that allow us to wonder whether the book’s message is essentially democratic or hierarchical. The article also examines selected, representative examples of wordless picture books, illustrating the wide range between various creators’ strategies. These examples show many different levels of meaning encoding in visual narratives, including literal representations of reality, abstraction, and encoding of meaning on many different levels. The conclusions highlight that local ways of seeing always impose a particular view of the world, making democratic access to the content of wordless books an unrealistic goal. However, when we consider their reception as a multimodal interpretation based on language, democratic dialogue is possible, but only allowing multiple perspectives to exist simultaneously.
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