engleski

Irony in Picturebooks

Even though often inconspicuous, irony is, alongside sarcasm and grotesque, one of the most common social and cultural phenomena. Its main feature is indirectness. Authors of various genres include it in their works. This thesis focuses on irony as a literary and narrative device found in picturebooks. Some scholars claim that the picturebook is ironical by definition (Nodelman, 1988) due to the differences in meanings found in its two layers, verbal and visual. The first chapter introduces the distinction between irony and humor. This chapter also considers the children’s capability of detecting irony. The second chapter is dedicated to picturebook as a multimodal form of art and addresses three main aspects of reading picturebooks: shifting attention between the verbal and the visual discourse, interactivity and re-reading (Narančić Kovač, 2015). These aspects are embraced by the notion of transmediation, a process of translating one sign system into another (Sipe, 1998). Irony in picturebooks is considered in this context. The third chapter analyzes several examples of picturebooks to demonstrate the appearance of the three main types of irony (situational, dramatic and verbal). In conclusion, the thesis addresses the potential of using picturebooks in the classroom to improve the children’s capacity to recognize and analyse irony.

irony ; humor ; falsehood ; metalinguistic awareness ; picturebooks

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