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
christophe.meunier@univ-orleans.fr
International Conference at Stockholm University
13th-15th September 2013
Text, image, ideology – Picturebooks as meetingplaces
Proposal:
A Cultural Geographic object: The Children’s Picture book
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 of what Walter Bejamin’s view expressed in 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 been constructed from 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
1
Yves Winkin, Anthropologie de la communication. De la théorie au terrain, De Boeck, 1996, pp.214-216.
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.
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.