Formar Leitores para Ler o Mundo - Leitura Gulbenkian - Fundação ...

32
Peritexts and Page Breaks:
Opportunities for Meaning-
-Making in Picturebooks
LAWRENCE R. SIPE*
Introduction
This paper deals with two studies that examine two major affordances of
picturebooks for aesthetic enjoyment and exploration. The first is the
presence of an elaborate «peritext», to employ Gerard Genette’s terminology,
in the form of dust jacket, front and back board covers, endpapers,
dedication page, half-title page, and title page, as well as the back endpapers.
All of these elements are carefully planned so as to «surround» the
story and prepare the reader for it. A number of scholars have written
about picturebook peritexts, or specific elements of the peritext, such as
the endpapers. However, not much work has been done to examine the
responses of young children to these elements. Of course, children must
be guided by an astute teacher, but when this happens, even young children
use peritextual elements in sophisticated and astute ways. Thus, the
first part of the paper explains the elements of picturebook peritexts
briefly, and then gives several examples of how children from 4 to 7 years
of age interpreted these elements.
The second part of the paper deals with another element that is quite
important to picturebooks, but which has received less attention from
either theorists or researchers. This element is the page turns (sometimes
called page breaks) from one double-page spread to the next. Because picturebooks
are most often quite brief, the author, illustrator, designer,
and editor must decide what to include in the story and what to leave
out. As we turn from one double-page spread to the next, there is always
a gap or indeterminacy in the action, and to make sense of the story as a
coherent whole in terms of both words and the picture sequence, we
must make inferences about what happens between one double-page
spread and the next. Page turns are therefore very carefully considered
when picturebooks are constructed. I present several examples of the
ways in which young children were invited to fill in the gaps represented
by the page turns, through the simple device of the teacher asking,
«What do you think happened between these two double-page spreads?»
The children’s responses, just as their responses to peritextual elements,
* Professor Adjunto na Escola Superior de Educação da Universidade da Pensilvânia, E.U.A.
33