A Mama for Owen: re-addressing adoption creatively in an accordion of visual parallelism

Abstract

This article critically explores the concept of ‘adoption’ via the semiotic analysis of the picture book A Mama for Owen (Bauer and Butler, 2007), which stands here as a testimony of adoption narratives and the ways in which they are creatively re-addressed in the context of children’s literature – as children’s books challenge traditional stories, establishing a contrastive dialogue, they are able ‘to sow and nurture the seeds of social change’ (see Reynolds, Children’s Literature, 2011: 5). The study proposes the application of textual tools of analysis developed in the area of stylistics (see Short, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays, and Prose, 1996; Simpson, Stylistics: a Resource Book for Students, 2004; Toolan, Language in Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics, 1998) to the examination of the visual mode. In particular, it suggests (partial) visual repetition and visual parallelism as creative tools that are essential here in the process of meaning-making and re-assessment of adoption. The analysis of the visual mode is completed drawing on visual grammar (see Kress and Van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2006[1996] and Painter, Children’s Picture Book Narratives: Reading Sequences of Images, 2009) and pictorial metaphors (see Forceville, Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising,1996, and Non-Verbal and Multimodal Metaphor in a Cognitivist Framework: Agendas for Research, 2006). The investigation identifies the semiotic choices at play and their multimodal display in terms of storytelling and narrative progression (see Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, 1972) in an accordion-like structure that results in the cognitive power of a work of art. The article ultimately embraces picture books as enriching multimodal narratives that can build more inclusive communities, in this case celebrating the family unit beyond the genetic bond or gender roles.