Childhood Hermeneutics and the Uniqueness of the Aesthetic Reading of Childrens Lit
Encyclopaideia – Journal of Phenomenology and Education. Vol.28 no.69 (2024), 73–84
ISSN 1825-8670
Essays– peer-reviewed
Childhood hermeneutics and uniqueness of the aesthetic reading of children's literature
Stefania Carioli— Link Campus University (Italy)— Contact: s.carioli@unilink.it
Stefania Carioli is Associate Professor of History of Pedagogy and Education at Link Campus University, Department of Human Sciences. Her research focuses on the intersection of children's and young adult literature / media and pedagogy of reading, particularly as the implications related to digital and electronic media.
Published: 2024-08-08
Childhood Hermeneutics and the Uniqueness of the Aesthetic Reading of Children's Literature
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the uniqueness of the aesthetic reading of children's literature and child hermeneutics as foundations for reading education. The first section examines Louise Rosenblatt's transactional model of aesthetic reading and Wolfgang Iser's phenomenological approach, as well as their theoretical implications for reader-response criticism. The paper's second section focuses on some more recent reader-response criticism research directions, which investigate postmodern picturebooks whose proposals within the educational scene have generated conflicting opinions. However, empirical studies that have investigated the point of view from which real children authentically live the experience of reading have demonstrated the surprising ability of younger readers to fathom and interpret these ambitious narratives, which invite readers into an experience that enhances interpretive resourcefulness. The characteristics of this variety of books reveal an implicit trust in the hermeneutic potential of younger readers, which contradicts the deep-rooted idea that continues to paint them as incapable of artistic-aesthetic experiences and unable to express their own hermeneutics.
The aim of this contribution is to reflect on the specificity of the aesthetic reading of children's literature and children's hermeneutics, as foundations for reading education. Based on Louise Rosenblatt's transactional model of aesthetic reading and its convergences with Wolfgang Iser's phenomenological approach, in the first part of the contribution the theoretical influences on reader-response criticism and on empirical studies aimed at investigating the point of view are considered from which real girls and boys authentically live the experience of reading. In the second part, the contribution focuses on some more recent research directions of Reader-response criticism, which explore postmodern picturebook, whose proposal within the educational scene has given rise to conflicting opinions. Indeed, empirical studies demonstrate the surprising ability of younger readers to fathom and interpret these ambitious narratives, which invite readers into an experience that valorizes interpretive resourcefulness. The characteristics of this variety of books reveal an implicit trust in the hermeneutic potential of younger readers, which contradicts the deep-rooted idea that continues to paint them as incapable of artistic-aesthetic experiences and unable to express their own hermeneutics.
Keywords: Children's hermeneutics; Aesthetic reading; Children's literature; Reader-response criticisim; Picturebook.
Index
1Introduction
In the introductory note to the chapter Readers, texts, contexts: Reader-response criticism(Benton, 2006), Peter Hunt highlighted the distinctive aspect of the composite and diversified research field of Reader-response criticismcompared to most of critical theory which deals with children's literature, that is, the commitment aimed at exploring the point of view from which real girls and boys authenticallylive the experience of reading (Hunt, 2006, p. 81), a commitment aimed at investigating the path that leads them to become readers of literature, the way in which through reading they relate to literature, aimed at broadening knowledge on the relationship of readers with children's literature (Duthoy, 2023), accepting as a presupposition that the literature itself is more deeply understood if observed also through the gaze, impressions and thoughts of young and very young people (Benton, 2006). A reflection - that on the "surprising specificity" of "childish hermeneutics", on the "authentic relationship that is created between them and certain narratives", on the "choices properly made", on the "mixtures", on the "contaminations" (Faeti, 2010 , p. 10) – which clarifies the uniqueness of the aesthetic reading of children's literature, in other words, of a reading with intentions that are anything but moralistic or instrumental.
This contribution focuses on infantile hermeneutics and the uniqueness of the aesthetic reading of children's literature, based on Louise Rosenblatt's transactional (Deweyan-inspired) model of aesthetic reading; on the convergences between the studies of Rosenblatt herself and those of Wolfgang Iser, and focusing on the theoretical coordinates that have particularly influenced Reader-response criticism.
Children's hermeneutics captures and welcomes the authentic value of children's interpretative resources, recognizes their depth in giving meaning to the metaphorical worlds of narration and their uniqueness in highlighting aspects that are sometimes not visible to the adult reader. Significant, in this regard, are the words of Maria Nikolajewa and Carole Scott who, in representing the process of reading the picture book as a hermeneutic circle, maintain that children, when they ask to have the same book reread over and over again, in reality, they do not read the same book, rather, they deepen their interpretation more and more, unlike adults who have lost this way of reading, because they ignore everything and consider the illustrations simplistically decorative (2013, p. 2). 1
In the last part, the contribution considers the specific traits of some contemporary literary artistic formats - the so-called postmodern illustrated books - which, due to their centrifugal force with respect to tradition, often extremely sophisticated contents and structures, have raised the question whether the young people are able to cope with their reading. Faced with narrative proposals that deviate from those that custom deems most suitable for childhood, that pre-established interpretative system continues to recur, tending to reduce children's representation, the vision of reading, the characteristics of the texts to be chosen for They. In fact, within this consolidated system, children continue to be conceived only as naive readers, incapable of living artistic-aesthetic experiences, incapable of expressing their own hermeneutics; nor, in this system, is interpretative variety accepted: reading is seen exclusively as a tool for "transmission of clear and punctual information", of didactic descriptions "of facts and events in the world" (Campagnaro, 2017, p. 10). On these assumptions, the choice falls on "plots often flattened on didactic needs", on "reassuring" and "accessible" books, while marginalized or completely forgotten is the idea that
the encounter with literature is also a dazzling encounter with beautiful letters and beautiful figures. It is the story of a love affair with the highest forms of storytelling (Ibidem).
If the way of introducing younger people to the world of reading and if the readings chosen for them reflect the image of how children and young people are perceived by adults (Bodmer, 1991), the representation that transpires from an idea of reading focused on banal and schematic plots is that of a young reader limited in his imaginative strength due to the urgency of favoring rudimentary tools that can be verified in the short term; a young reader whose autonomy of judgement, sensitivity, freedom of interpretation and thought will be subordinated to other logics. Plausibly, the inhibition of a certain way of reading and the implementation of conditioning and containment systems in accessing stimulating mental spaces open to knowledge and imagination - as are certain narratives for children - can also be interpreted as not strangers to new forms of control over young minds, control which, as Milena Bernardi (2014) has argued in depth, presents itself as a sophisticated system of conditioning, rather than as real censorship. From this point of view, lowering our gaze towards what is excluded from the critical interest or from the mainstream of proposals aimed at children, on what is culturally stigmatized or marginalised, is of particular interest.
2 The reader's hour
In the field of children's literature studies, Reader-response theory has entered the work of scholars interested in exploring children's experience with literary texts, understanding their perspective as literary readers and how best to enhance their authenticity. And yet, it was not an entry without doubts or hesitations. The concepts underlying the theoretical framework of Reader-response theory were born in the field of literary criticism of the adult reader (Benton, 2006; Hirvela, 1996) as a challenge to the text-centric perspective , which overshadowed or expunged the interpretive intervention of the reader ( Eco, 1979; Eco, 2020/1979). Differently, the new perspectives affirmed the role of the reader, removing from the focus of the critical discussion the notion of an autonomous text, to be examined in its objective structure, and replacing it with a new creation of that text by the reader (" the reader's recreation of that text ", Benton, 2006, p. 84). Umberto Eco defined this cultural turning point as La hora del lector(Eco, 1992, p. 23) – a title with a prophetic value borrowed from Josep Maria Castellet's 1957 work – while recognizing the hermeneutic gesture, the reflux of memories and lived experiences by the recipient/reader, as constitutive components of the text (Bertoni, 2011) and studied "the problem" (Eco, 1979; Eco, 2020/1979) of interpretative cooperation aimed at filling the empty spaces, "what the text does not says (but presupposes, promises, implies and implicit)", as a "lazy mechanism", which "lives on the surplus value of meaning introduced by the recipient", giving particular value precisely to the "interpretative movements which, as Barthes later showed, produce [ …] the pleasure […] of the text" (Eco, 2020/1979, sp).
When the perspective of Reader-response theory entered the field of studies on children's literature, it explored the specific implications of the real experience of reading the artistic-literary work. The starting point is the conception of reading as an act founded, not so much on the discovery of the meaning of the text (in a sort of archaeological excavation), but rather on a creation by the reader (" reading is not the discovery of meaning [like some sort of archaeological 'dig'] but the creation of it ", Benton, 2006, p. From the descriptions of what children feel during their reading experience, an otherwise hidden activity emerged, it was possible to clarify the mystery of what they think and feel, to grasp the nature of the reader's interpretative process that creates the meaning of the work literary. Dealing with both textual qualities and the relationship to the text as complementary elements of a unified experience, reader response approaches in children's literature have all established a relationship with pedagogy (Benton, 2006; Hunt, 2006). The theoretical premises were thus laid for familiarization with a framework of ideas that the majority of critics and school teachers did not recognize even until a few decades ago: the child reader was no longer seen as a tabula rasa , a "not yet reader", but as an active protagonist, who brings his own personal knowledge and sensitivity to the act of reading, with significant variations that have opened up to interpretative plurality and forged a new relationship between reading and literature education (Benton , 2006).
3 The time of the young reader
The reflections of the reader's hour in the field of criticism of children's literature were not immediate, given that, in the strenuous attempt to obtain critical respectability for this literature, the emphasis on the text continued to prevail. As Aidan Chambers pointed out - among the first to underline the limits of a distinction made between the literaryapproach and the pedagogical approach in the field of criticism of children's literature and to consider the implicit young reader drawing from the phenomenological perspective of Wolfgang Iser (1978 ) – child-centered approaches were rejected by those who considered them a danger to the literariness of children's literature: " rejection of any concept of the child-reader-in-the-book by those people who have sought most earnestly for critical respectability " (Chambers, 2012, p. 2). In the critical examination of the level of development of readers, texts, contexts from the perspective of reader-response , Benton (2006) observed how the works of Wolfgang Iser and Louise Rosenblatt are those that have had the greatest influence in the pedagogical field of teaching children's literature. The two authors contributed to introducing the idea - still epochal at the end of the twentieth century - according to which one cannot speak of the significant existence of a text outside of the relationship with its readers, thus providing an epistemological basis also for the consideration of the literary experience of younger people. According to Whalen-Levitt (1980), Iser's and Rosenblatt's studies contributed to bringing children's literature into the "realm" of literary study, because literature began to refer to a range of experiences and - not only – to a group of texts . The shift in emphasis to the experience of the reader, gradually also of the young reader , rather than on the text, encouraged the consideration of even children's first books as a subject of study that had until then been excluded. On the new epistemological presuppositions, in fact, an illustrated book such as, for example, the well-known Good Night Moon (Wise Brown, 1947), until then considered too simple and too illustrated to be properly the object of critical analysis, emerged from the literary undergrowth together to the child reader who, avoiding simplistic assumptions, began to be seen as a parent of the adult reader (Whalen-Levitt, 1980).
4 Reading as a literary experience
Despite going through different lines of investigation, Iser's and Rosenblatt's studies reached very similar results. Both focused on what happens during reading and the nature of literary experience, moving away from a view of this process as a linear progression and admitting interpretive diversity. Reading has been considered as a situated and complex act , in which the clear difference between subject (reader) and object (text) disappears, in the sense that we cannot simply speak of a reader acting on the text or of a text acting unidirectionally on the reader but, rather, in terms of the dynamic interrelationship between reader and text (Whalen-Levitt, 1980).
4.1 Aesthetic reading and efferent reading
Given how it addresses and clarifies fundamental presuppositions for a pedagogy of children's literature, it is interesting to recall here the well-known distinction made by Rosenblatt between efferent reading and aesthetic reading . In fact, despite the simplifications and misunderstandings aroused by this model, it remains the main theoretical reference to explain the aesthetic components that intervene in the relationship between young readers and literary texts (Pantaleo, 2013; Soter, Wilkinson, Connors, Murphy & Shen, 2010) . It should be said preliminarily that Rosenblatt defines reading by borrowing the term "transaction" from John Dewey (Dewey & Bentley, 1949), to indicate a basic epistemological concept distinct from that of "interaction". If the concept of interaction implies the presence of dualistically separate and already defined entities that act on each other, the term "transaction", instead, suggests a reciprocal relationship, which is defined in a mutual relationship between elements that are phases of a situation taken in its totality (Rosenblatt, 1986). 2 Reading is perfectly defined by the term "transaction", because it is a process
that occurs between a particular reader and a particular text at a particular time and in particular circumstances. All these factors influence the transaction between reader and text. In fact, the reader does not approach the literary text to discover an already defined entity, the meaning of the literary work of art. Each reader brings with him a unique set of meanings, a legacy of past experiences with language and texts throughout his life. The transaction with the signs of the text activates a bidirectional or, better, circular flow of dynamically intertwined symbolizations that mutually reverberate and merge (Rosenblatt, 1986, p. 123).
Starting from this definition, the scholar declines a variety of forms of reading, which she describes by referring to two main typologies, placed at the ends of a continuum:
each reading event falls within a spectrum that covers what I have defined as predominantly efferent or predominantly aesthetic positions . Efferent is the type of reading in which attention is concentrated on what must be retained: the meaning emerges from an abstraction and analytical structuring of ideas, information, conclusions to be retained or used subsequently. The predominantly aesthetic attitude, which covers the other half of the continuum , instead designates a willingness to focus attention on what is experienced in relation to the text during the reading event, therefore, not only what the words indicate, but also the associated qualitative aspects. The sound of words, their repetition and rhythmic variations can be heard with the metaphorical inner ear, which gives rise to those internal tensions, sensations, feelings and associations that accompany images and ideas, coloring scenes, actions and imagined characters. The evocation is sensitively experienced starting from texts such as poetry, novels, dramas. It is to this lived work, to this evocation, that the reader responds during the transaction and which will subsequently be evaluated, analysed, criticized (ibid., p. 124).
The efferent and aesthetic approaches are alternatives, but both necessary. The problem that Rosenblatt sees in the teaching of literature is that it suffers from the failure to recognize that the literary work is the evocation experienced by the reader during the transaction with the text. Precisely because the aesthetic-efferent continuum is not understood, young readers are not helped to develop the habit of assuming a position appropriate to the particular reading event. Even if the teaching of literature offers quality texts, questions are asked about them that reward efferent reading, concentrated on the information to be extracted and retained. The young reader's attention is, in these cases, oriented towards what will be required next, generally, paraphrase, synthesis, categorization of genres, analysis of technical stylistic detail or attribution to biographical or historical periods, etc. However, the efferent aspects should not hinder the lively personal circuit that is created between the literary work and those who perceive it, the essence of which consists in the evocation that involves, at various levels, the person's organism in its entirety (Rosenblatt, 1978; 1986; No matter how young the reader is, the aesthetic reading experience contributes to the growth of personal abilities to evoke connections, providing the basis of an education that helps to grow sensitivity and refinement. When, however, teaching allows only a vague and hasty experience with literature, limited to efference and based mainly on second-hand reports, from the teacher or the critic, without favoring – or even preventing – an initial aesthetic transaction , without helping the young reader to savor, to delve deeper into the lived experience, to take it up again and reflect on it, combining sensorial, affective and cognitive elements, in a process of progressive awareness of the internal states relating to the perception of the work, to organize it the sense, in these cases, the teaching of literature is even counterproductive (Rosenblatt, 1986).
5 For a pedagogy of children's literature
An analysis of education in reading children's literature - current in its aims of defining how and why literature is essential for development, listening to the children themselves - was proposed by Margaret Meek. 3 In the wake of the approaches on the centrality of the reader, and largely assuming the perspective of Reader-response criticism (Benton, 2006), Meek has declined in an exquisitely operational-laboratory key the fundamental questions at the center of the discussion addressed here, weaving the plot of a pedagogy of literature. At the end of the 1980s, the scholar published How Texts Teach What Readers Learn (1988), which she significantly defines as a " workshop " (Meek, 1988, p. 3). In this volume, she starts from what - only apparently - may seem like truisms but which in reality turn out to be aspects that are anything but obvious, because they are overlooked, despite their evident basicity. First of all, you point out that, although it is clear that literary narratives are necessary to train readers, in reality, in most studies on reading, only fleeting mention is made of the specificity of reading children's literature. In fact, discussions about teaching reading are often decontextualized, focused mainly on the process , while the text is treated as a neutral substance on which that process works: as if the reader reacted in the same way when faced with a poem or a picture book, rather than a time or warning (Meek, 1988).
The enormous potential that children's literature has in itself for eliciting forms of interpretation is not appropriately valorised, as demonstrated by the failure to take into account the implications - of expectations, of knowledge already possessed and of "reader" behaviors - with which children they arrive at school. The ability to tell stories through images through the interpretation of illustrations, for example, presents itself early as a form of symbolic manipulation, which is an integral part of the ontogenesis of literary competence . The same can be said of intertextual connections , which children come into contact with very early, as soon as they begin to remember rhyming texts, such as nursery rhymes for example, and to recognize their references when listening to readings aloud. But it is a wealth of opportunities that inevitably gets lost in a literacy journey in which reading is reduced to a mere decodingof words. And this loss risks being even more harmful if we consider that recognizing words on the page certainly does not exhaust the ability to read. Meek focuses on this decisive point to underline how, contrary to an all-too-widespread conception, one does not become a reader by first developing a series of decoding and comprehension skills and thenapplying these skills to literary texts. Rather, first we learn to operate as readers, acting mentally on texts heard or on illustrated narratives which allow even the youngest to intervene with first forms of recognition, hypotheses, predictions, representations. Only subsequently and in continuity with this knowledge and on this basis will it be possible to start the process of acquiring decoding, without however ever losing sight of the importance of continuing to allow the mental manipulation of the text, the commitment to interpretation on which builds the reader's educational journey.
For their part, however, teachers, worried about what students need to learn and the responsibility of helping them reach those goals early, tend to underestimate or not consider these early discoveries about reading, what intrigues children and what attracts them most of this world, which, at best, they have known as a source of rituality and closeness to the adult figures emotionally close to them, as a journey in the name of that gratuitousness, "which is the only currency of art" - to use the very famous words with which, a few years later, Daniel Pennac would talk about reading (2000, p. 27). And, if they do not find the opportunity to express themselves, their knowledge will be ignored and the continuity with their experiences and memories will be broken, resulting in a profound fracture in the educational journey to become readers.
Meek suggests, therefore, to give space to the innuce expressions of literary skills, to valorise reading as discovery, not to explain everything; to also leave to subsequent readings the discovery of other secret clues with which the artist has sprinkled his narratives; to put children in a position to show their acute observational skills and to be able to collect in-depth details, in the depths of the less obvious intentions of the authors. Furthermore, admitting the charm on younger people and the influence of the stories proposed by the electronic media, the scholar observes another element of discontinuity: on the one hand, the authors, who have begun to present their narratives more and more frequently in recent decades in intriguing formats, which use visual expressive codes similar to those of the screen; on the other, a teaching of reading that has the written word as its sole concern, demonstrating how the legacy of the idea of illustrated books as a pre-literate form of narration continues to persist.
Further consideration deserves the context of relationships and the sharing of reading with others, as fundamental aspects of an activity that does not take place in a vacuum, although we are inclined to think of it as silent and solitary. And, keeping in mind that the main places for sharing reading are the family and other educational contexts - including, first and foremost, the school - the methods that are implemented in these places are crucial, an integral part of the baggage of impressions on reading that every child will carry with them throughout their lives (Meek, 1988; Williams, 2006).
6 Quality and variety of readings
The opportunities brought into play by quality works of children's literature far exceed those of books that Meek defines as schematic, which do not offer stimuli, challenges, enigmas to be revealed, nor appeals to the inner dimension of the youngest. Quality children's literature breaks the mold, is constantly exposed to experimentation, to changes in genres and narrative styles, to variations in the way of inserting intertextual references. These distinctive characteristics are an integral part of the quality of works of children's literature, which thus manage to respond to the different tastes and needs of different readers. In fact, a first, fundamental experience that the literary work offers is the nature and richness of the ways in which the authors can narrate and, on the other hand, the different possible interpretations that those narratives are able to generate in the reader. In these works, the world is represented with unique artistic styles and with visual and verbal metaphors that connect to what girls and boys know and/or are learning, how they live their experiences, placing themselves from the perspective of childhood. The representations created in these works are realistic, in the sense that young readers perceive the relationship with their psychological reality, but they also offer other possibilities, inconvenient, excessive, daring escape routes, which the adult world may not tolerate, even though they are much appreciated by children (Meek, 1988).
The authors who exploit their art, and the illustrators who make pictures with secrets, link what children know, partly know, and are learning about the world, to ways of presenting the world in books. These presentations are lifelike, that is, the reader senses their relationship to psychological reality. But they are also scandalous, excessive, daring possibilities that the real world, the world of adults, might not endure, but which are real to children. Look for the picture books of Edward Ardizzone, John Burningham, Anthony Browne, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes, Janet and Allan Ahlberg, and of course, Maurice Sendak. Read them with your most adult awareness of life and literature and text, and you will see that the invitations they offer to young readers are far from infantile. Children who encounter such books learn many lessons that are hidden forever from those who move directly from the reading scheme to the worksheet(Meek, 1988, p. 19).
Rather than condemning some of these stories, labeling them as inappropriate , adults should take the time to help younger people enter into the stories, make their own judgments, with a growing tolerance of ambiguity and awareness that things are not exactly as they are. they seem. The invitations that these works offer, in fact, are anything but childish : the children who encounter them receive a multiplicity of stimuli, which will remain forever unknown to those who move directly from reading schematic texts to worksheet. The result is that between young readers who have entered the world of reading through the multiple meanings of polysemous texts and those who, instead, have reductively trained on the features of written words for the sole purpose of decoding exercises, there is a distance in terms of reflective depth and connotative qualities of reading, which those who have only had an unreflective experience feel lacking when faced with a text that means more than what it says on the surface, such as a quality narrative text.
So, encouragement to speed up decoding should be replaced by accompaniment to good reading. Otherwise, Meek points out in an effective metaphor, readers run in place, but don't move away in their minds . The power of certain narratives lies precisely in the incentive to move thoughts, to overcome categorizations; in the clash with the usual interpretative models, because these narratives make the variety of expressive methods, levels of focus, points of view plausible, keeping them together in a single space. The accompaniment of good readings is thus a defense against the tyranny of the reductive power of functional literacy (Meek, 1988), good readings become a refuge for the freedom of the reader from heavy social conditioning, for his more thoughtful participation and open to the possibilities of lĕgĕre , that is, of gathering stimuli to create interior worlds and imagining something that isn't there, that hasn't been there but could have been, that isn't there now but that could be there in the future or in a different reality" (Carioli, 2018, p. 8).
7 Recent research directions in reader-response criticism
Admitting the complex variety of literary aesthetic experience, Reader-response criticism makes use of different empirical research methods, all of which, however, can be traced back to a qualitative approach , which places emphasis on the interpretative perspectives of readers, including surveys, observations, diary writing, group discussions, expressions of individual feelings and thoughts, etc. (Duthoy, 2023). If the first studies attributable to the Reader-response criticism approach investigated the young reader's response to fiction and poetry (Benton, 2006), the most recent empirical research has identified further directions in exploring the response of readers of different ages to the same literary work (Duthoy, 2023), as well as in the exploration of young readers' response to multimodal narratives such as picturebooks and wordless picturebooks , also in their postmodern developments 4 (Driggs Wolfenbarger & Sipe, 2007 ; Graff & Shimek, 2020; Kümmerling-Meibauer, 2015). Even without making specific reference to the postmodern picturebook , but more generally to the picture book as a precious "cultural product" within the educational scene, precisely because of the way in which image and word collaborate, discovering a variety of illustrative and verbal styles, Marco Dallari underlines :
From a cognitive point of view, the association of word and image and the implication of the interpretative processes connected to the metaphorical dimension which strongly characterizes this type of text, helps to unlearn to recognise, as Lyotard (2008) says, because it makes one discover that there is no a right (and unique) way of visually representing something, but there are, for every representation, infinite possibilities (Dallari, 2018, p. 11).
7.1 Postmodern picture books and children's hermeneutics
The deliberately open margins of certain postmodern illustrated books celebrate the fluctuating meanings and their indeterminacy, continuing the pending game with the readers' expectations, inviting them to an experience that is poles apart from the reading of literature aimed at transmitting morals or precepts (Klinker, 1999). In enhancing the creative resourcefulness of young readers, these artistic literary formats reveal a profound confidence in their hermeneutic potential. In fact, some of them present on their pages a gallery of illustrations in which imaginary and fantastic worlds are represented, which despite being part of the same book are apparently distinct from each other: the reader is put in the position of being able to open the book to a any page and to read, remaining on a single illustration or discovering narrative connections between the various pages, because there is nothing specific or predetermined, but only visual and verbal suggestions. An example is the "fantastic" The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg (1984), which exhibits an enigmatic mix of mysterious and extraordinary black and white illustrations and equally obscure strings of words. Inspired (as the author himself, Shaun Tan, states) by the unprecedented idea of a book expressed in The Mysteries of Harris Burdick , is The Red Tree (Tan, 2001), a minimally verbalized and surrealistically illustrated book, which follows the fragmented journey of a young . The impulse that guided Shaun Tan – as he himself said – was the attempt to describe feelings using metaphorical , visual and verballanguage . In the absence of an explicit narration of the story, a picture book like The Red Tree invites the reader to derive his ownmeaning, a meaning that tends - as in a fuzzylogic - to mix with the semantics of meaning , lending itself to a never definitive reading , always relativized and questioned:
any apparent meaning is always imbued with uncertainty: the red tree can flourish, but it can also die. Nothing is absolute or definitive and this reflects real life and the continuous search for a solution. The ideas in this book are very broad and I think they focus on a method of expression, rather than a specific content. The Red Treenot only tolerates variable interpretations, but needs them, and this seems appropriate to the theme, because everyone's experience of suffering or hope is unique and personal (from Shaun Tan's website, trans. and cit. in Carioli , 2022, p. 132).
Equally paradigmatic of the call for interpretive polyphony is the postmodern picture book Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998). In it, four monologues describe the subjective version of the walk in the same park of a woman, a man, a boy and a girl, respectively, son and daughter of the two adult characters. The perspective variety of this narrative interrupts the monological discourse of a dominant voice, while the multilinearity of the narrative structure gives life to various incipits and multiple endings - or the absence of both, in the most usual sense of the expression - engaging the reader in autonomous choice between the multiple narrative lines and in the game of discovery in pages teeming with intertextual references to classics of children's literature (such as Mary Poppins in the Park ) and to the entire range of artistic languages: from the surrealist painting of René Magritte, to the expressionist one of Edvard Munch; from Renaissance to Flemish art; from references to the cinematic icon King Kong , to those to sculpture, dance, music, …. At the center of this narrative, the awareness of the interpretation of everything that surrounds us, of the subjectivity of the perception of reality, rendered with a plurality of clues disseminated by the author throughout the narrative. And if it is true that the play of different voices and motifs staged in this book decreases the possibility of condescension to a single point of view, it is equally true that hidden connections also live deep inside, an incentive to go beyond the surface and of appearances, to the end, to connect the less immediately visible threads of a complex plot (Carioli, 2022).
The proposal of books like these within the educational scene has given rise to conflicting opinions, since, according to some, the multiplicity of narrative lines that intertwine various levels of meaning, the presence of metanarrative and self-referential devices that draw attention to the mechanism of literary fiction, the ironic distance and the parody, the density of intertextual references to be discovered and of metaphorical language which both the illustrative and verbal apparatus is full of would be excessively complex, inaccessible, difficult to understand. In fact, empirical studies based on Reader-response theory have continued to demonstrate the surprising ability of younger readers to fathom and interpret these ambitious narratives (Kümmerling-Meibauer, 2015) and thus revealed, once again, the unexpected hermeneutic disposition of girls and boys, if and when conditions are created around them that favor and make authentic interpretation possible.
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