THE ENGLISH ALPHABET 2

A is for Alphabet Books Traditional and Postmodern... Characteristics of Traditional Alphabet Books • Reinforce the fact that the world is objectively there by using realistic, familiar

A is for Alphabet

Books

Traditional and Postmodern

Discussion question :

What are alphabet

books for?

But what do alphabet

books do?

• reflect cultural values

• teach a philosophy or an ideology

of language

Alphabet books transmit cultural values This

illustration from Mary Azarian’s A Farmer’s

Alphabet uses woodcuts, a nostalgic way to produce

graphic art, to reinforce the nostalgia of the picture

itself

Discussion question:

What cultural values do your books seem to communicate?

What do we mean by a philosophy

Two views of language

“describe” it – success of the utterance is most important

– author’s intention is

“in” the words

J.L.Austin, in How to Do Things with Words , at first suggested

that constatives and performatives were opposites But later, he began to think of them as an historical continuum.

Traditional alphabet books offer no challenge to the to-world direction of fit The world is objectively there, and

words-we just need to find words to name the things words-we discover

For instance, look at these two images from John

Burningham’s ABC No surprises here.

Characteristics of Traditional

Alphabet Books

• Reinforce the fact that the world is objectively

there by using realistic, familiar objects

• language is a tool for naming and describing

• pictures are also tools for identifying and

Postmodern Beginnings

Postmodern alphabet books seek to disturb

a ready relationship between words and the world Postmodern books seek to show the materiality of language in the world This means that instead of a being simply a pointer to something beyond itself, or an transparent medium through which we learn about other things, language itself is a presence in the world and must be thought

of as an actual part of the thing it describes.

Dr Seuss, always an innovator

• Dr Seuss’s ABC Book shows how language

and imagination go together.

• On Beyond Zebra challenges the possibilities

of our present alphabet, showing how it

limits our imagination.

• The Cat in the Hat Comes Back makes an

even stronger statement about the

insufficiency of language.

After invoking the help of all of the letters of

the alphabet to no avail, the Cat finally

releases a sound beyond the alphabet to

achieve the effect he needs.

“describe” it – success of the utterance is most important

– author’s intention is

“in” the words

Since language can be said to do all those things, and have all those effects, we call it material that is, it has its own density and presence in the world.

Different authors portray the materiality of language in

Others emphasize language’s performativity, and vulnerability:

Chris Van Allsburg, The Z Was Zapped

Other author/illustrators are more

inventive, and pose a greater challenge

to traditional views of language’s

relationship to the world.

Mitsumasa Anno, for instance,

in Anno’s Alphabet: An Adventure

in Imagination, presents language

itself as material puzzle, or

impossibility

A technique that shows that language is in fact a part

of what it describes can be found in Mary Beth

Owen’s A Caribou Alphabet This technique also

de-emphasizes the nature/culture dichotomy.

In Suse MacDonald’s Alphabatics, the

letters materialize into things in the

world:

Language, freed of its primary function

of referring to things outside itself, is

thought of as self-referential

Characteristics of Postmodern

Alphabet Books

• Language is presented as material.

• Language creates, rather than describes, the world.

• Words and letters do things; language is performative.

• Generate a desire for open-ness and fashioning, for ordering the world

self-according to personal preferences.

Get into groups and look at your alphabet books How does your book present the relationship between words and the world? Would you characterize it as

modern or postmodern?