Barnboken: Tidskrift för Barnlitteraturforskning (Dec 2018)
Bildens status i läsarkommentarer på nätet: Narrativ interaktion i Jakob Wegelius Legenden om Sally Jones och Mördarens apa
Abstract
Title: The Status of the Picture in Readers’ Comments Online. Narrative Interaction in Jakob Wegelius’ The Legend of Sally Jones and The Murderer’s Ape The award-winning novels Legenden om Sally Jones (2008; The Legend of Sally Jones, 2018) and Mördarens apa (2014; The Murderer’s Ape, 2017) written and illustrated by Jakob Wegelius present a thought-provoking interplay between verbal and visual narration. However, an online data collection of blog posts and online reviews reveals that readers discuss the verbal narration and intersectional themes in these novels, but often overlook the pictures. This study contributes to the discussion of narrative interaction by juxtaposing analyses of pictures in the novels and online comments by readers on these literary works. The material thus consists of comments by non-professional writers, and the degree and type of attention paid to narrative interaction in these comments is foregrounded. In order to examine the word/image interaction in Wegelius’ novels, Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott’s typology for interaction is used on a selection of images and, when possible, on readers’ responses to these novels. The results show that in the material, the verbal narration is privileged. Less than a third of the online material explicitly comments on the visual narration. Even fewer readers comment on the relationship between the verbal and the visual narration. The study presents potential explanations to the relative absence of comments on the visual narration in these literary works. A likely explanation is that the readers perceive the symmetrical and enhancing relation between the verbal and the visual narration, and, thus, the readers consider the visual narration redundant or an add-on. Therefore, the article highlights the continuous need for explicit training in visual literacy, as the interaction between words and images has a bearing on the narration.
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