Exploring Picturebooks Through the Model of Double-Scope Stories

This article investigates the picturebook as the aesthetic object that integrates the verbal narrative and the visual narrative, and hinges on interactions between the two levels of narratives. Often drawing on the theory of semiotics, picturebook scholars have revealed the complex interactions between the verbal and the visual, the demands that a picturebook may put on the reader, and the hermeneutic nature of picturebook reading. Two signifi cant issues, however, still need to be further explored: why the reader can possibly relate and integrate the verbal and the visual, and why some readers may turn to pictures more than to words, or vice versa. I propose to explore the two issues primarily through the model of double-scope stories within the theoretical framework of cognitive criticism. I argue that the universality of the intellectual and imaginative activity of conceptual blending makes it possible for the reader to relate pictures to words, or vice versa, and to integrate them. Though to make meaning from the picturebook as a double-scope story requires the reader to integrate the two levels of narratives, the verbal and the visual can sometimes constitute two relatively independent input stories. Readers may be more oriented towards either one of them, partially due to the difference in their innate cognitive structures. The arguments will be illustrated with a close analysis of Lane Smith’s picturebook Grandpa Green.