This study aims to explore the features of time in the postmodern picturebooks by investigating how time is represented in the postmodern picturebooks in reference to Genette's narrative discourse theory and aims to elicit educational implications fro...
This study aims to explore the features of time in the postmodern picturebooks by investigating how time is represented in the postmodern picturebooks in reference to Genette's narrative discourse theory and aims to elicit educational implications from the exploration.
The research question was as it follows. How is time represented in the postmodern picturebooks by Genette's narrative discourse theory?
The theoretical reviews were carried on the narratology, the time in the modernism and the postmodernism. In addition, Genette's narrative discourse theory and narrative of picturebooks were reviewed.
The study was conducted by following procedures. First, nine postmodern picturebooks were chosen and the words and the pictures of each book were analyzed in terms of tense, mood, and voice which Genette suggested as time in narrative discourse. Next, the results from the content analysis were put together to find out the way how the time is represented in the postmodern picturebook. Finally, the educational implications of time in the postmodern picturebooks were elicited.
The results of the study are summarized as follows. First, the postmodern picturbooks reveal deconstruction, subversion and synthesis of time. The analepsis and the prolepsis are condensed, synthesized and deconstructed into present through various forms of the intertextuality. The narrative time is collapsed in distinctive narrative structure. The fiction and the reality are overlapped and different layers of time are fragmentated. Second, time is regarded as a vital subject and component in the postmodern picturebooks. These are presented as the subjective time that can be experienced individually and the ambivalent time that can not coexist with others are interwoven. Third, time in the postmodern picturebooks exposes hidden meaning of the picturebooks and is used as an important device to lead readers into a play and it becomes a principal tool to construct meanings. It arouses laughs and pleasure through subversion, satisfaction and rhythm and create a play to solve puzzles and riddles.
According to the results of this study, following implications can be suggested.
First, time cannot be analyzed within the structure. Especially time order, duration and frequency irrelevant to mood nor voice are no longer interpreted in the structure. It shows the concept of time in the postmodern picturebook turns away from the structure of modernism and moves toward postmodern explanation that was mentioned by various philosophers such as Deleuze, Derrida and Lacan etc.
From this, postmodern picturebooks can be a major tool to help readers understand postmodernism. Therefore, it is necessary to provide children with opportunity to experience the time of the postmodern picturebook at home as well as educational institutions.
Second, time in the postmodern picturebooks allows readers to actively participate in the text with the status of the second author. Readers can compose their own time from the experience of fictional knowledge of the texts.
Understanding time in the postmodern picturebook is the key in the act of decoding text. That is, time encourages readers to carry out an aesthetic reading in relation to their own lifetime experience.
Third, reading and understanding the postmodern picturebooks can promote multi literacy. In consideration of heterogeneity of postmodern text which requires multiple media literacy, also, postmodern picturebook is regarded as an excellent tool to help readers to have more delicate multi literacy. With this, reading time which build the structure of the plot and constitute meaning can be fundamental to acquire complex and multi-natured literacy which enables deconstructive reading.