A is for Alphabet

Books
Traditional and Postmodern
Discussion question:
What are alphabet
books for?
 But what do alphabet
books do?
• reflect cultural values
• teach a philosophy or an ideology
of language
 Alphabet books transmit cultural values. This
illustration from Mary Azarian’s A Farmer’s
Alphabet uses woodcuts, a nostalgic way to produce
graphic art, to reinforce the nostalgia of the picture
itself.
Discussion question:

What cultural values do your

books seem to communicate?
What do we mean by a philosophy
of language?
Does language tell and describe
reality and the world?

Or does it create and change

that reality?

Can thought exist independently of

language?
 Two views of language
• Constative or • Performative
authoritative – creates reality
– describes reality – the world conforms to
– words are found to fit fit the words used to
the world “describe” it
– precision in language – success of the
is most important utterance is most
– author’s intention is important
“behind” the words – author’s intention is
“in” the words
 J.L.Austin, in How to Do Things
with Words, at first suggested
that constatives and
performatives were opposites.
But later, he began to think of
them as an historical continuum.
 Traditional alphabet books offer no challenge to the words-
to-world direction of fit. The world is objectively there, and
we just need to find words to name the things we discover.
For instance, look at these two images from John
Burningham’s ABC. No surprises here.
 Characteristics of Traditional
Alphabet Books
• Reinforce the fact that the world is objectively
there by using realistic, familiar objects
• language is a tool for naming and describing
• pictures are also tools for identifying and
idealizing objects
• language is also a tool for sorting and
categorizing
• generate a desire for order and mastery
 Postmodern Beginnings
Postmodern alphabet books seek to disturb
a ready relationship between words and the
world. Postmodern books seek to show the
materiality of language in the world. This
means that instead of a being simply a
pointer to something beyond itself, or an
transparent medium through which we
learn about other things, language itself is a
presence in the world and must be thought
of as an actual part of the thing it describes.
 Dr. Seuss, always an innovator
• Dr. Seuss’s ABC Book shows how language
and imagination go together.
• On Beyond Zebra challenges the possibilities
of our present alphabet, showing how it
limits our imagination.
• The Cat in the Hat Comes Back makes an
even stronger statement about the
insufficiency of language.
After invoking the help of all of the letters of
the alphabet to no avail, the Cat finally
releases a sound beyond the alphabet to
achieve the effect he needs.
 Remember this?
Two views of language
• Constative or • Performative
authoritative – creates reality
– describes reality – the world conforms to
– words are found to fit fit the words used to
the world “describe” it
– precision in language – success of the
is most important utterance is most
– author’s intention is important
“behind” the words – author’s intention is
“in” the words
Since language can be said to do all those things, and
have all those effects, we call it material--that is, it
has its own density and presence in the world.
 Different authors portray the
materiality of language in
different ways:
• Some playful, as if
language were literally
a space of play

• Leslie Tryon, Albert’s

Alphabet
 Others emphasize language’s
performativity, and vulnerability:
Chris Van Allsburg, The Z Was Zapped
 Other author/illustrators are more
inventive, and pose a greater challenge
to traditional views of language’s
relationship to the world.
Mitsumasa Anno, for instance,
in Anno’s Alphabet: An Adventure
in Imagination, presents language
itself as material puzzle, or
impossibility .
A technique that shows that language is in fact a part
of what it describes can be found in Mary Beth
Owen’s A Caribou Alphabet. This technique also de-
emphasizes the nature/culture dichotomy.
In Suse MacDonald’s Alphabatics, the
letters materialize into things in the
world:
Language, freed of its primary function
of referring to things outside itself, is
thought of as self-referential.
Characteristics of Postmodern
Alphabet Books
• Language is presented as material.
• Language creates, rather than describes,
the world.
• Words and letters do things; language is
performative.
• Generate a desire for open-ness and self-
fashioning, for ordering the world
according to personal preferences.
Get into groups and look at your
alphabet books. How does your
book present the relationship
between words and the world?
Would you characterize it as
modern or postmodern?