engleski

A Semiotic Approach to Non-Fiction Picturebooks

The chapter focuses on the non-fiction picturebook and its subcategories and aims to describe its content and discourses with respect to fictionality. The analysis and the discussion are based on the findings of classical narratology (Chatman 1978), transmedial narratology (Ryan 2005) and medium-specific narratology (Ryan 2014). In narrative non-fiction picturebooks, the verbal discourse generally conveys expository information in line with the real word, and the visual discourse adopts the same status. In contrast, the analysis of non-fiction nonnarrative picturebooks has shown that their discourses may combine fictional and non-fictional meanings in the same picturebook, while the whole still functions as non-fiction. If the visually depicted entities evoke concepts which are not fantastic, but realistic, their non-fictionality is secured by the status of the verbal discourse: pictures inherit non-fictionality from words. Only if they represent entities that cannot be related to the factual reality, i.e. entities possible only in a fantasy world, are they fictional and add a layer of fictionality to the non-fictional whole. This is the most notable difference between narrative and nonnarrative non-fiction picturebooks derived from our analysis. Picturebook discourses sometimes invite readers into a game. The game of make-believe lies in the foundations of the fictionality, but the metafictional game with make-believe, with invented concepts and combinations of meanings, as well as the interactivity initiated by picturebook discourses, belong to the readers’ own, real world. For this reason, such picturebooks usually keep their non-fictional status. After all, it depends on the reader’s understanding whether the reference world of a picturebook is fictional or non-fictional.

picturebook ; verbal discourse ; visual discourse ; fictionality ; non-fiction ; reference world

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