Listening to the walls and seeing through them: aesthetics acknowledgements by reading picture books

Abstract

This essay is divided in three parts: first, I contextualize the literary picture book as a hybrid cultural object, in which two both visual and verbal languages are integrated to produce meanings, causing a unique effect to the receptor, who is understood not only as an intelect-computative subject but also emo-affective. Such conceptions require an methodologic approach in literature teaching which takes in consideration the ilustraded book as a whole, as it provides an aesthetical and poetical experience far beyond the verbal; the valuation of its formal, plastic and graphic aspects by the educator guarantees an approximation between book and reader by sensitive and affective ways, implying the valuation of the medias and environments that feed the reading acts and its habits. Second, through a brief analysis of two editions of the tale Discurso del Oso [The bear’s discourse], by Julio Cortazar, one in its original context, in Historias de cronopios y de famas (1962), other to a children ilustrated book (2008), I show how the illustrated updates stimulate a different approach. At last, in the third part, I make my last consideration, based on the idea of art as knowledge and on a trans-discipline grid; all artistic expression, verbal, artistic, musical or other is exercised or apprehended as a whole action/experience, resulting from the association of various sensitive and poetic languages, contributing to give shape to an world permeable subjectivity.