Cuteness and aggression in military picturebooks

• Authors: Kümmerling-Meibauer Bettina , Meibauer Jörg
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

As a subspecies of ideologically loaded picturebooks, this chapter focuses on military picturebooks. This term encompasses picturebooks dealing with war and the roles of soldiers. In the first part, a taxonomy of military picturebooks is created which is exemplified by telling examples. The second part focuses on a particular narrative problem of military picturebooks that is of interest to a cognitive theory of picturebooks (as pursued by Kümmerling-Meibauer & Meibauer 2013). On the one hand, it is not possible to represent war as a good thing across the board; on the other hand, war is depicted with respect to certain scenarios of self-defence. The narrative solution seems to be that “cute” characters (that is, anthropomorphic animals and vehicles) are introduced who serve as positive military protagonists that have to fight against aggressive characters representing the enemy. In military picturebooks, there is a contrast between cuteness and aggression that is astonishing when regarding the typical pedagogical demands on the accommodation of picturebooks to the child’s cognitive abilities.

Keywords

EN

character; cognitive theory of picturebooks; cuteness; military picturebook; propaganda war in children’s literature

PL

postać literacka; poznawcza teoria książki obrazkowej; estetyka “cutness”; militarna książka obrazkowa; wojenna propaganda w literaturze dla dzieci

• Publisher: Polskie Towarzystwo Pedagogiczne
• Journal: Problemy Wczesnej Edukacji
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 3(34)
• Pages: 7-21

Dates

published

2016

Contributors

author

Kümmerling-Meibauer Bettina

• University of Tübingen (Germany)

author

Meibauer Jörg

• Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (Germany)

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Identifiers

DOI

10.5604/01.3001.0009.4839