The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317526599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Containing forty-eight chapters, The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks is the ultimate guide to picturebooks. It contains a detailed introduction, surveying the history and development of the field and emphasizing the international and cultural diversity of picturebooks. Divided into five key parts, this volume covers:

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• Concepts and topics – from hybridity and ideology to metafiction and emotions;

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• Genres – from baby books through to picturebooks for adults;

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• Interfaces – their relations to other forms such as comics and visual media;

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• Domains and theoretical approaches, including developmental psychology and cognitive studies;

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• Adaptations.

With ground-breaking contributions from leading and emerging scholars alike, this comprehensive volume is one of the first to focus solely on picturebook research. Its interdisciplinary approach makes it key for both scholars and students of literature, as well as education and media.

Part I

Concepts and topics

1
Author-illustrator

Kerry Mallan

The concern of this chapter is not with the process of writing and illustrating a picturebook but with the concept of ‘author-illustrator.’ In exploring this concept I draw on two key texts – Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (1968) and Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” (1969) – to examine the question of ‘authorship’ in its broadest sense, and to consider how the concept of author-illustrator can contribute to these discussions, especially at a time when author-illustrators need to participate in a wide range of public media spaces for their professional and artistic survival.

In the decades since “The Death of the Author” and “What Is an Author?” first appeared, the world has become more market driven and digitally sophisticated, changing how texts are written, illustrated, published, distributed, and transformed. Evolving digital technologies and software platforms are changing notions of the text, authorship, and reader-text interaction. In tandem with these digital transformations and spaces, publishers are also finding new ways to not only promote their authors in the public media but also brand their products (including their authors), and sell licenses of their books/book characters to toy, clothing, game, film, and DVD companies (see Hade and Edmondson 2003). All of these activities paradoxically reinscribe and erase the author in multiple ways.

Barthes’s controversial essay “The Death of the Author” shifted attention away from the ‘Author-God,’ the creative genius who passed on truths that needed clever readers to uncover. For Barthes, the author did not exist once the work had moved into the public sphere. In his view, this removal or ‘death’ of the author created a space where readers were free to make their own meanings: “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (1977: 148). Furthermore, each new reading of a text would elicit different meanings and significations. In raising the reader above the author, Barthes was challenging the idea of the ‘authority’ of the author that had long been interpreted as authorial intention. Readers were no longer expected to regard authorial intention as the true meaning of a text, but were now, in a sense, authors in their own right. In debunking the idea of the capital-A ‘Author,’ and revising the idea of authorship, Barthes also brought to readers’ attention the processes that often were invisible in the creation of a text (such as consultation, collaboration, editing, layout, and design).

Foucault’s response to Barthes argued that the idea of the death of the author and the killing of his or her ‘authority’ did not take account of the fact that the world is driven by cultural production and market forces; however, Barthes was well aware of “an increasingly multimediated artistic culture” (Allen 2004: 495, emphasis original). Foucault’s point was that authors and their books are commodities and the author’s name performs a role both in the circulation and reception of texts and in narrative discourse (1998: 210). Rather than disappearing, Foucault felt that the author “seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being” (211). Foucault suggested that the ‘author-function’ could be just as important in understanding texts as anything else.

I turn now to revisiting notions of author-illustrator as a way of examining how this dual identity has come to be understood and perpetuated in different contexts. I will then consider some of the key issues that arise from the work of Barthes and Foucault for this chapter, namely, the irony of the death of the author and changing notions of authorship and readers, and how a multimedia public sphere contributes to the evolving notion of author-illustrator.

What is an author-illustrator?

A simple answer to the question posed in this section’s heading is that the designation ‘author-illustrator’ embodies an individual who writes and illustrates with equal or varying proficiencies of skill, creativity, and ingenuity. Achieving this dual identity for some comes after years of working in a different artistic field (for example, Eric Carle was formerly a commercial artist) or after illustrating other authors’ works. Many author-illustrators continue to illustrate texts other than their own long after they have been successful in writing and illustrating their own books. Thus, the designation of author-illustrator is somewhat fluid as it is not necessarily a fixed attribution; nor is it unproblematic, especially when it is understood within a wider cultural context.

The designation ‘author-illustrator’ suggests an implied hierarchy – the elevation of writing over illustrating. How this designation appears on the cover and title page contributes to a tradition of unease between the verbal and the visual that dates back to Horace’s famous observation: Ut pictura poesis (“as in painting, so is poetry”) in his Ars Poetica (19–10 BC). Rather than, as Horace suggested, that the visual (painting) is prioritized over the verbal (poetry), subsequent debate continues to argue whether or not the verbal is the master discourse and the visual is subservient (Hay 2006: 51f.). This uneasy dialectic can be seen as continuing in picturebooks where the order and description of the attributions can appear on the cover and title page as: “written and illustrated by”; “words by […] and pictures by […]”; “by […] illustrated by […].” Rarely, if ever, is the reverse order given. This matter is of course not relevant when it is one person who assumes the role of author-illustrator (or illustrator-author). In the case of Dutch writer and illustrator Ted Van Lieshout, his diverse works include picturebooks, books for early readers, novels for children and young adults, poems, song lyrics, and television scripts. Illustration is integral to his work, so much so that even his collections of poems have been called “poetry picture books” (Duijx and Van Lierop-Debrauwer 2014: 96), which we could see as befitting Horace’s Ut pictura poesis.

The placement of the author before the illustrator may seem to imply the dominance of the word over the image, but even taken as separate terms, ‘author’ is afforded a particular form of cultural capital which is implicit in how Sandywell defines ‘author’ as being ‘typically’ associated with the verbal: “the seminal point of origin, originator, producer, composer or efficient cause of anything, typically of a written text” (2011: 161). In a world where the image and visual forms of knowledge are produced and consumed with increasing voracity, the written text is perhaps becoming less typical as the source of authorship. The problem is complicated when one considers that the verbal medium is the predominant mode of critical and analytical discussions about art, literature, and indeed, picturebooks. It may simply be a case of established orthodoxy whereby the ‘artist’ as a composite term is variously defined and classified according to institutional or elitist criteria (for instance, publishers’ or literary awards and funding for the arts). While we can see writers, illustrators, musicians, and performers coming under the category of artist, author-illustrators remain a specialized sub-group that seems to elide consideration outside of the world of children’s literature.

Words and images are integral to the unity of the picturebook, as each brings together different semiotic structures that have different traditions, methods, and histories. How an author-illustrator develops a picturebook – from a written outline or a storyboard – is part of the idiosyncratic creative/artistic process. While the idea of an individual who functions as author and illustrator would seem to solve any problems where a text is let down by poor or inappropriate illustrations (or vice versa), there is no guarantee that the result will be always better than one that was produced collaboratively between an author and an illustrator (or between multiple authors and illustrators). However, some picturebooks are produced with little or no collaboration, with the publisher assigning an illustrator to undertake the illustrations. A lack of collaboration or teamwork can result in what Nikolajeva and Scott see as a “mismatch of text and image” (2006: 30). There are, of course, many examples of compatibility of text and image through successful collaborations such as Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales 1992); Allan Ahlberg and Janet Ahlberg (The Jolly Postman 1986); Libby Hathorn and Gregory Rogers (Way Home 1994). In the case of book awards, such as the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for “an outstanding book in terms of illustration for children and young people,” the visual is prioritized, but the criteria for selection includes “a synergy of illustration and text” (www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk), a point which addresses the ‘mismatch’ concern of Nikolajeva and Scott.

While some author-illustrators prefer to create this synergy of illustration and text in a state of solitariness, at some stage of the process others provide input. As Lawrence Sipe quite rightly says, a picturebook is the result of a process that involves multiple people including editors, designers, and technical experts (2011: 239). We could add to this list family, friends, and colleagues; even students provide ideas and advice on works in progress during author visits to schools, or in some instances, children and communities are credited as co-creators. For example, the picturebook Going Bush (2007) is a collaboration between Australian author Nadia Wheatley and illustrator Ken Searle along with sixteen students from eight schools across Sydney. The text showcases and credits some of the writing and illustrations made by the students, which are linked together by Searle who assumed artistic and design control, and Wheatley provided the narrative. Consequently, any text, no matter its provenance, is always co-created and mediated regardless of whether it is credited to a single author-illustrator or not.

This multiple input into the creation of a picturebook not only raises questions about ownership but also impacts on interpretation. For Nikolajeva and Scott, it also raises the matter of multiple intentionality which they consider could lead to “ambiguity and uncertainty” (2006: 29). The following discussion considers the complexity of authorship – single, dual, and multiple – in relation to the essays by Barthes and Foucault.

The author is (not) dead

As this section’s heading implies, there is a certain paradox or irony that operates in the now familiar phrase ‘the author is dead’ when one considers how popular authors today are marketed in order to ensure that they are very much ‘alive’ in the eyes of the reader/book buyer, even if they have indeed died (the enduring popularity of the author Astrid Lindgren or author-illustrator Maurice Sendak long after their deaths are cases in point). Harold Love (2002: 7) points to another irony, in that writers, such as Barthes and Foucault, in asserting the death of the author were at the same time asserting their own ‘heroic authorship’ even in their questioning of it.

Barthes’s metaphorical killing of the author attacked the modern tendency to treat authors as cultural icons, yet authors (including author-illustrators) continue to be marketed as celebrities with special book readings and school visits, ensuring that children can not only meet flesh and blood authors but also read/buy their books. Changing approaches to literacy teaching in schools have also encouraged children to become familiar with popular authors and illustrators, their works, their creative process, and even details of their personal lives. This process of author recognition or familiarity extends beyond the classroom and is aided by robust, distributive marketing strategies by publishers, as well as interest in authors at children’s literature conferences, book signings, writers’ festivals, and other cultural activities.

Central to Barthes’s argument was that the death of the author, where the meaning of text was once no longer seen as controlled by the author, gave rise to the “birth of the reader” (1977: 148). Without being limited by the biographical substance of the author or the idea of the author as authority figure or cultural hero, the reader, for Barthes, was free to be creative, to actively engage in the production of textual meaning. Young readers may be unaware of, or disinterested in, Barthes’s capital-A ‘Authors’ (or indeed, ‘Author-Illustrators’), but may readily participate in the creative co-production of meaning, interpretation, and appropriation of texts for their own purposes and enjoyment. Teachers, librarians, and other adults often encourage children’s playful engagement with texts, and the part that postmodern or interactive texts play in encouraging reader participation or co-creation cannot be underestimated.

This form of reader-text interaction, however, is similar to Foucault’s idea that writing itself is like a game (jeu) whereby rules and limits are transgressed, in order to create a space into which the author (or writing subject) disappears (1998: 206). In playing these writing and illustrating games, the ‘author’ of the source text disappears as new authors and illustrators create their own texts which in turn are the basis for further playful disruption, imitation, and redesign. Foucault’s point is that writing is often seen as something completed by an author, rather than something that is a process or a practice that is constantly revised, edited, and appropriated.

Very young children are also offered opportunities for a different kind of playful engagement with books that feature inventive moveable parts (such as Jan Pieńkowski’s Dinner Time (1980), produce light as in Eric Carle’s The Very Lonely Firefly (1995), and sounds as in Ocean (2008) from Maurice Pledger’s ‘Sounds of the Wild’ series of picturebooks), encouraging a multisensory exploration. This attention to the materiality of the text not only accentuates what Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer sees as “the production process and the physical character of the book itself” (2015: 252), but also exploits the multimodal possibilities of the picturebook as a stimulus for reader interaction. This kind of multimodal artistic product is similar to the multimedia artistic culture that Barthes had in mind at the time of his writing. Allen (2004: 495) explains that Barthes chose to publish ‘The Death’ in an art magazine (5+6 of Aspen: The Magazine in a Box), where each issue was published in a box which included contributions in the form of posters, postcards, photographs, phonograph recordings, games, and among other objects, John Lennon’s ‘pocket diary of the future.’ These various forms of reader engagement as game player, author, and illustrator demonstrate Barthes’s birth of the reader and the seeming disappearance of the author, yet the paradox of the death of the author continues.

In the global marketplace, not only does the author’s name become part of the brand to be promoted and sold, but also the work, or in some instances, the character (Clarice Bean, Madeline, Spot) displaces its author creator (Lauren Child, Ludwig Bemelmans, Eric Hill), achieving its own cultural status. Digital platforms and public media bring the text to an ever-eager consumer market that delights in novelty, nostalgia, and buying merchandise. As Hade and Edmondson point out, “the book, each spin-off piece of merchandise, and e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction: picturebook research as an international and interdisciplinary f ield
• Part I Concepts and topics
• Part II Picturebook categories
• Part III Interfaces
• Part IV Domains
• Part V Adaptations and remediation
• Index