The Centre for Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Wrocław has the honor to invite you to another lecture in the series „International Voices in Children’s Literature Studies”.
The lecture entitled “Why We Always Read Them Again and Other Related Issues: a Semiotic Model of the Picturebook” will be delivered in English by prof. Smiljana Narančić Kovač (University of Zagreb, Croatia).
The lecture will take place on 13 December 2023 at 18.00 via the MS Teams platform. If you are interested in attending the lecture, please contact dr Elżbiera Jamróz-Stolarska, at: elzbieta.jamroz-stolarska@uwr.edu.pl.
About the lecture:
This presentation aims to provide an overview of a semiotic model of the narrative picturebook as a format and as a specific kind of art, and the variants derived from it. This semiotic model is consistent with the model of the narrative established by the classical narratologists and it also takes into account the findings of the more recent results of transmedial and media-conscious narratology. The semiotic model of the non-narrative picturebook is constructed in analogy to the basic model of the narrative picturebook. The presenter shows that combinations of fictional and nonfictional (factual) elements on the one hand, and of realistic and fantastic modes on the other are possible in both narrative and non-narrative picturebooks. The presentation will give examples from Croatian and international picturebooks. The inaugurated model of the picturebook, embracing its two discourses, makes it possible to resolve several rather confusing issues, such as the way in which the picturebook communicates meanings, the necessity of its metafictionality, how narrative perspectives are established, why re-reading is inevitable and how many stories and narrators are there in narrative picturebooks. The talk will propose some explanations of these defining features of the picturebook, based on its unique semiotic model, and will hopefully offer ground for discussion.
Bio:
Smiljana Narančić Kovač, PhD, Full Professor, recently retired from the Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb, Croatia, where she taught several courses on children’s literature and headed the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature and Culture (2018–2023). Her research interests include comparative literature, the narrative, picturebook theory, children’s literature, and contact and transfer studies. She served as the PI for a national research project on children’s literature translations (2015–2018). She is the Editor-in-Chief of Libri & Liberi: Journal of Research on Children’s Literature and Culture, published by the Croatian Association of Researchers in Children’s Literature. She organised the 14th Child and the Book Conference (Zadar, Croatia, 2019) and the 9th International Conference of the European Network of Picturebook Research (Osijek, Croatia 2023).
