Garry Disher, Michael Ondaatje, and the Haptic Eye: Taking a Second Look at Print Literacy

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0045-6713/00/0300-0039$18.00/0 Q 2000 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

Children’s Literature in Education, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2000

W. F. Garrett-PettsW. F. Garrett-Petts isAssociate Professor ofEnglish at theUniversity College ofthe Cariboo, where heteaches Canadianliterature, rhetoric, andcritical theory. Co-editor of TextualStudies in Canada andcoordinator of theCentre for Research onMultiple Literacies, hehas published widelyon reading theory,literature, and interartspractices. Recentpublications includeWriting aboutLiterature (Broadview,2000), IntegratingVisual and VerbalLiteracies (InkshedPublications, 1996), andhe is currentlycompleting a study ofimage/text compositioncalled PhotoGraphicEncounters.

Garry Disher, Michael Ondaatje,and the Haptic Eye: Taking aSecond Look at Print Literacy

Karen Day told me a story not long after my copy of Garry Disher’sThe Bamboo Flute arrived. She had been reading aloud a series ofpicture books in her university language arts seminar. One afternoonshe held up a copy of Pat Hutchins’s Rosie’s Walk, a book with illus-trations and text arranged separately on alternate pages, and asked theclass what they noticed. “Every other page is blank,” suggested one ofher students, apparently confident that the words, not the images,were of principal interest. The student’s response lays bare an other-wise muted assumption among readers, publishers, and many educa-tors: that the visual elements in a text may be safely ignored, mar-ginalized, or simply edited out.

Like Day, I find myself troubled by anthologies and new editions thatreprint the writing but leave out the accompanying visual art; but I’meven more troubled by the disassociation of seeing from reading. Itseems a curious anomaly that while the inherent value of an inte-grated curriculum is taken for granted in the early grades (thanks tothe work of programs like Harvard’s Project Zero and Italy’s ReggioEmilia), both opportunities and advocacy for integrating literacies be-come increasingly rare when students move up through the educa-tional system. By the time students reach university, the goals of anintegrated curriculum become replaced by the demands of highly spe-cialized, print-centerd discourse. The promotion of rich perceptualexperiences as vehicles for academic inquiry becomes, at the veryleast, suspect; creative play and risk-taking have little “legitimate”place in higher learning. Part of the problem, as Day has written else-

40 Children’s Literature in Education

where, involves the social values imparted during teaching: very earlyon, typically around grade four, children learn “that books with pic-Karen Day, “From the

Eighteenth-CenturyIllustrated Book toContemporaryChildren’s PictureBooks: Teaching the‘Third Text’”

tures are for ‘little kids’ and are to be put aside when the youngreaders can ‘really’ read” (1996, p. 69). Consistently academic andespecially, literary culture exhorts us to wean “young,” “lazy,” or“dull” readers away from a reliance on visual aids. “Illustrations ingeneral,” writes critic Marianna Torgovnick, “may be harmlessenough, may sometimes even be helpful to readers who have diffi-culties visualizing as they read. But, like eye glasses improperly used,they dull the average reader’s visual imagination, accustoming him toMarianna Torgovnick,

The Visual Arts,Pictorialism and theNovel: James,Lawrence, and Woolf

relying on illustrations and not his own faculties” (p. 96).

Yet, as Richard Kostelanetz points out, “much of the best writing de-pends as much on visual literacy as on verbal literacy; many ‘readers’literate in the second aspect are illiterate in the first” (p. 29). TheRichard Kostelanetz,

“Book Art” usual argument for privileging written language over other forms ofexpression seems based on an implied hierarchy of discourses. Inschool settings, reading means reading written texts. Still, as HowardGardner and others have argued persuasively for at least the lasttwenty years, written language “is by no means the only (and in manycases, not even the most important) route for making sense of theworld” (pp. 87–88). Certainly, the kind of blindness that sees the illus-Howard Gardner, Art,

Mind, Brain: ACognitive Approach toCreativity

trated page as “blank,” a blindness seemingly sanctioned by ped-agogies of reading tied to the print-literacy establishment, needs fur-ther consideration. For if Kostelanetz and Gardner are right, that weprivilege verbal literacy at the expense of visual literacy, then asteachers and readers we may be missing out on—or even misrepre-senting—what Kostelanetz describes as “much of the best writing.”Karen Day’s reading of the visual and verbal cues in the Australianedition of Disher’s book, for example, suggests what can be gained bylearning to read word and image together.

Disher’s book, as Day describes it, situates the photographs as a formof marginalia that can be “read into” the center of the work. At firstglance, the cropped images seem little more than a border print, adecorative frieze. As the reader progresses through the text, however,the relationship between word and image becomes more complex—even provocative. The presence of the author’s boyhood image, forexample, like the famous childhood photograph of Michael Ondaatjethat concludes The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, asserts a com-plex visual signature—an image of identification that links author andsubject, and as Day suggests, involves the reader in multiple interpre-tive tasks.

Once the emphasis on print alone is variously shifted or complicated,the book ceases to function as an unproblematic, transparent me-

Taking a Second Look at Print Literacy 41

dium. Instead, it takes on a kind of sculptural quality—a quality thatinvites full sensory response. The book becomes something to touch,to flip through, while comparing whole images with details andmatching photographs with descriptive passages. As I see it, the liber-ated “imagination” that Day finds in reading Disher’s work is not thesame imagination that Marianna Torgovnick and the print-literacy es-tablishment seek to protect. For Torgovnick, imagination is somethingnurtured by print but impaired by visual illustration. Imagination re-quires work, and illustrations do too much of the work for the reader/viewer. What Day draws to our attention is the use of illustrations asoblique references, as ironic visual cues which may work the reader’simagination hard, even harder than print alone.

If we are to understand fully the reading experience Day describes(and advocates), then we need to begin adapting contemporary read-ing theory to the task. We need to adjust the print-based schema; weneed to situate picture books as part of a larger genre including ar-tists’ books, visual arts installations, and literary works that combineimage and text. Perhaps the best known literary example of suchmixed-media composition is one already mentioned: Ondaatje’s TheMichael Ondaatje, The

Collected Works of Billythe Kid

Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Via a discussion of Ondaatje’s work,I’d like to extend and further contextualize the issues and insightsKaren Day has initiated.

Included in the opening pages of Michael Ondaatje’s fictional portraitof the outlaw Billy the Kid is a much-discussed and highly ambiguousimage: a blank frame captioned with an “explanatory” quotation fromthe photographer L. A. Huffman. The quotation suggests that theframed white space is “a picture of Billy made with the Perry shutteras quick as it can be worked—Pyro and soda developer” (p. 5). Thejuxtaposition of text and absent image reminds us of Day’s principleof oblique reference. Like Disher’s work, the “missing” photographseemingly invites more than a strictly “literary” reading, for the carefularrangement of poetic line, photographic image, technical discourse,and imported elements of popular culture speak to a multidimensio-nal sensibility. In fact, when interviewed, Ondaatje himself speaks ofthe work in cinematographic terms, as the film he didn’t have themoney to make:

[W]ith Billy the Kid I was trying to make the film I couldn’t afford toshoot, in the form of a book. All those B movies in which strange thingsthat didn’t happen but could and should have happened I explored inthe book. . . . Certainly with The Collected Works of Billy the Kid“An Interview with

Michael Ondaatje,” inSpider Blues: Essays onMichael Ondaatje, SamSolecki, ed.

design was very important. We had to determine the type, the paperdesign, the paper texture, where the photographs would go, things likethe first page on which Billy’s photograph doesn’t appear. I find it diffi-cult to write while a finished book is in the process of being printed,


Figure 1. Images of the cover and page five from Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.(Reproduced courtesy of Michael Ondaatje.)

cos [sic] the printing itself is an art form and I’m deeply involved in it.(Solecki, 1975, pp. 20–21)

Given this emphasis, both within and without the work, on the con-ventions and artifacts of visual representation, it seems remarkablethat so little has been said about the actual photographic elements.1

Like Karen Day’s student, many critics and teachers see only the blankspace. Smaro Kamboureli, for example, in a highly intelligent and de-tailed reading of the work, sees the framed white space as announc-ing “the ‘negative’ of narration,” merely an empty frame having “noprecise subject or origin” and on its way to becoming “the discourseof language itself” (p. 183). However, in photographic terms, theSmaro Kamboureli, On

the Edge of Genre whiteness, made as Huffman’s note asserts, “with the lens wideopen,” does not necessarily signify a “negative,” an absence; it mightjust as easily signify an overexposed presence. The distinction is im-portant, for too often the literary tends to erase and overwrite thevisual without due regard for the conventions of pictorial or photo-


graphic representation. While the photographic certainly intersectsand plays off the linguistic, it need not be elided or subsumed orhomogenized as “the discourse of language itself.” Surely we mustquestion an interpretive strategy that regards the quotations, para-phrases, and photographs we find in The Collected Works of Billy theKid as “signs of literariness” (Kamboureli, p. 186). They are partiallythis, of course, but they are also much more. Where Kamboureli—and admittedly most other literary critics—wishes to “affirm the tex-tuality of the long poem” (p. 186), I would suggest here that textualityis not an exclusively literary domain. Indeed, insofar as textuality, as acritical concept, denatures or otherwise subordinates the visual, I feelit impedes a full appreciation of the work—especially the materialexperience of reading, viewing, holding, and touching.

Despite recent acknowledgments that we are experiencing a “picto-rial turn” (Mitchell, 1994, p. 9) in our collective intellectual life, aW. J. T. Mitchell, Picture

Theory: Essays onVerbal and VisualRepresentation

linguistic bias continues to guide academic responses, especiallywhen it comes to teaching and writing about works of “art” that inte-grate the visual elements of vernacular culture. I have written else-where that not all modes of representation are created equal (1996).As Pierre Bourdieu has taught us, “the various systems of expressionPierre Bourdieu,

Photography: A Middle-brow Art

[theatrical presentations, sporting events, recitals of songs, poetry orchamber music, operettas or operas, etc.] are objectively organizedaccording to a hierarchy independent of individual opinions, whichdefines cultural legitimacy and its gradations” (p. 95; emphasis in theoriginal). Some modes of expression (say, classical music, or painting,or literature) appear more legitimate, and thus more literate, thanothers (say, jazz, or photography, or folktales—or children’s picturebooks). When legitimate and “illegitimate” modes are integrated, asthey are in photo-textual compositions such as Disher’s BambooFlute or Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works, a kind of class war-fare is set in motion—one that tests both the assumed decorum ofprint-literacy and the practiced patience of scholarly culture. The typi-cal response among most literary critics and teachers of English hasbeen to either ignore the visual dimension altogether or to domesti-cate it by treating the visual vernacular as simply one more textualreferent.

Manina Jones’s reading of The Collected Works—arguably one of themost visually aware readings to date—offers an important illustration.In defining what she calls the “documentary-collage” in Canadian liter-ature, Jones shows how many contemporary authors construct theirworks as a conversation of voices and images, some quoted and someinvented. Such works typically include a variety of physical referencessuch as those one might paste into a scrapbook or travel journal ordiary. According to Jones, such works elicit a feeling for “the mate-


riality of language” (pp. 14–15). The qualification “of language” seemsManina Jones, That Artof Difference:“Documentary-Collage”and English-CanadianWriting

important here, for the materiality of other modes—of the book’sphysical shape or make-up, of the photographs, of the reproducedvisual artifacts—is all too often treated as one more form of writing,as what she calls a historiographic referent. Citing Linda Hutcheon,Jones reminds us that “Unlike the historical (or real) referent, this oneis created in and by the text’s writing (hence historiographic)”(quoted in Jones, 1993, p. 71). But what if we were to allow, asreaders, the free play of these material signifiers? What if we were toacknowledge them as something other than purely linguistic, asmodes of discourse with their own histories, formal implications, andpotential effects on their readers/viewers?

The blank page that Day’s student reported, for example, suggests ahighly conventional reading, one tutored by a print-based bias againstvisual illustration. Ondaatje’s “blank” space, on the other hand, alludesto a history of visual representation where white canvasses are seenas meaningful. As Herbert Read notes, “every modern generation (be-Herbert Read, A

Concise History ofModern Painting

ginning with [Kasimir] Malevich) has produced its own brand ofwhite paintings. Although the motivations differ, there is often an ele-ment of puristic purging of other painters’ excesses in this” (p. 292).Read also allows that some works represent “bridging moments,”such as the White Paintings of Robert Rauschenberg or, I would ar-gue, the white spaces of Michael Ondaatje, where seemingly blanksurfaces are transformed into “screens on which shadows could fall”(pp. 292–93) or words show through. The white space is both em-blem of absence and an invitation to consider the material presenceof the page (or canvass) as object.

In The Collected Works there are two kinds of printing at play: textualand photographic. Like a photograph, the visual arrangement of im-age and text invites some degree of physical interaction. If we hold uppage five to the light, the source of the initial overexposure, the sup-posedly absent image gives way to the perfectly framed poem verso.2

The framed space, already meaningful as both a photographic tokenand a trace of the ineffable, is suddenly filled with text. Billy’s imageeludes us, and we shift instead to a verbal representation, a list ofthose killed by the outlaw, a list that includes Billy himself. Ondaatje’sstory of Billy is about the failure of both visual and verbal representa-tion: Billy is an escape artist who moves too quickly for any photogra-pher or writer to fix on paper. The framed white space thus functionsas both ironic figure and true ground for reading that which refusesconventional strategies of textual response. To read Billy, we mustresist any initial desire to “put the pieces of his life story together.”We must focus on the blank spaces, the visual and verbal gaps in thestory. Reading Billy becomes an overtly physical activity, a matter of


Figure 2. Photograph of page five held up to a light. (Reproduced courtesy of MichaelOndaatje. Photograph by Donald Lawrence.)

carefully examining the evidence, of comparing photographs, oftracking down references, of turning the pages with deliberate intent.The placement of the words, the use of white space, the incorpora-tion of actual and staged photographs: all these elements evoke acomplex sensory and intellectual response. Billy, like the seeminglyempty space on page five of Ondaatje’s book, remains invisible only tothose who rely on words alone to explain it all.

My comments on The Collected Works are meant to suggest an alter-native to the usual “literate mode” of inquiry, a way of reading thatteachers at all levels might well consider. Echoing Susan Sontag inRobert B. Ray,

“Afterword: Snapshots,the Beginnings ofPhotography”

Against Interpretation, Roger Cardinal and others are beginning toarticulate a strong case for what I’ve been calling “perceptual re-


sponse,” one which refuses a narrow linguistic or thematic focus “andinstead roams over the frame, sensitive to its textures and surfaces”(quoted in Ray, 1995, p. 158). Such an interpretative strategy is fullyin accord with an ancient interpretive tradition of “haptic inquiry,” atradition that Claude Gandelman has traced, via Descartes and Berke-ley, to the ancient idea that “vision is a form of touching” (p. 5). FromClaude Gandelman,

Reading Pictures,Viewing Texts

the Greek haptikos, which Gandelman translates as “capable of touch-ing,” the haptic eye finds both pleasure and meaning in texture, grain,and physical arrangement; it seeks a tactile understanding as a sensorycomplement to linguistic ways of knowing; it holds the page up tothe light.

The poet and critic Phyllis Webb believes that we may have literally“lost touch” with this sensual pleasure of reading—that our academicattention to the words on the page has distracted us (and our stu-dents) from a rich, texturally aware experience. She suggests thatwhen reading poetry, for example, a “sense of touch turned on by theeyes . . . is charged by the poem’s thingness, its design and structure”(p. 56). She encourages greater sensitivity to the sort of thing thatinterests Ondaatje, the page’s “design effect,” the “type used, colourof ink, ratio of black or blue or brown or red to white or grey orivory; . . . the dribble of type in a concrete outburst, decorative typo-graphical devices, as well as pictograms, hieroglyphs, drawings.” Allthis creates “texture,” and the “function of texture, visual and aural, isPhyllis Webb, Nothing

But Brush Strokes:Selected Prose

to give pleasure, create interest, and involve the reader or listener inthe [work’s] meaning and affect” (pp. 56–57).

It is this haptic mode that has encouraged reading researchers such asBeth Berghoff to argue that “working in multiple sign systems ex-pands rather than narrowly defines what counts as ‘reading’ andBeth Berghoff,

“Multiple Sign Systemsand Reading”

knowing” (p. 522); and some variety of haptic response is surely atplay in the kind of aesthetic experience Day describes: a highly en-gaged, sensory, deep reading of the work. In this context, we’d dowell to remind ourselves that

The isolation of a text for academic scrutiny is a very specific form ofreading. More commonly texts are encountered promiscuously; theypour in on us from all directions in diverse, coexisting media, and dif-ferently-paced flows. In everyday life, textual materials are complex,multiple, overlapping, coexistent, juxtaposed, in a word, “inter-textual.”Richard Johnson, “What

is Cultural StudiesAnyway?”

(R. Johnson, 1986–87, p. 67)

The problem, then, is that high schools and universities do not nor-mally teach “inter-textual” reading as a legitimate mode of response;and creative works that challenge conventional close reading strate-gies tend to be either ignored or read out of context. Such classroombiases all too frequently convince students that reading is somethingremoved from their everyday experience.


Perry Nodelman, whose work has focused mainly on children’s pic-ture books, offers an important corrective to this exclusive focus onprint. He suggests that literary competence of the sort required forsuccess in high schools and universities, begins with a recognition ofthe essential “doubleness of picture books.” Such books, he says, en-gage us in three potential stories: “The one told by the words, the oneimplied by the pictures, and the one that results from the combina-Perry Nodelman, “The

Eye and the I:Identification and First-Person Narratives inPicture Books”

tion of the first two” (p. 2). According to Nodelman, “This last storytends to emerge from ironies created by differences between the firsttwo” (p. 2). Learning to read for differences becomes a prerequisite toachieving literary competence:

The doubleness of literature . . . requires us to become involved in,even to identify with, its characters and situations but also to standback and understand those characters and situations with some objec-tivity. In the clear-cut doubleness of their words and pictures, picturebooks . . . can offer inexperienced readers an introduction to one of themost rewarding of literary competences. (p. 30)

Thus, picture books tutor the eye, teaching us to modulate betweenpositions of engagement and detachment.

Stephen Behrendt goes further, arguing that the combination of wordsStephen C. Behrendt,“Reader and Texts inthe Eighteenth-CenturyIllustrated Book:Illustrations asTeachers”

and images creates “a third ‘text,’ an interdisciplinary ‘metatext’ inwhich verbal and visual elements each offer their own particular andoften irreconcilable contributions” (p. 45). Berhrendt states the casebluntly: “as soon as illustrations are introduced into a book, the book-as-text becomes a very different sort of text.” In short, illustrations domore than merely illustrate: like Ondaatje’s framed white space, theyare “ ‘teachers’ that instruct us in more comprehensive and inter-disciplinary ways of reading” (p. 47). The visual elements function asa form of embedded interpretation, elucidating or otherwise compli-cating our responses.

There are many ways that we might take up the challenge of teachingimage/text works beyond the elementary grades. We can consider pic-ture books, of all kinds, as part of a mixed genre that ranges fromcomics and graphic novels to artists’ books, mixed-media installations,home pages and web sites on the World Wide Web. We can also con-sider the images in terms of their art historical significance, givingstudents an enhanced understanding of how visual styles and conven-tions have developed. Even more pressing, however, is the need toconsider ways to teach and validate the integration of visual and ver-bal literacies. Nodelman and Behrendt’s focus on response offers animportant point of departure, for the acknowledgment of visual liter-acy heightens reader awareness of reading as a perceptual act.


The first step toward developing a new reading pedagogy involves arepositioning of the visual and the verbal, a recognition that visual’sfamiliar decorative and illustrative functions are complemented byother important (and multiple) narrative roles. In terms of The Bam-boo Flute and The Collected Works, the visual elements encourage anenhanced emphasis on notions of margin and center, figure andground, and negative and positive; in addition, the presence of visualelements allows consideration of how pictorial and photographic rep-resentation variously competes, coheres, or otherwise colludes in thetelling of the story.

More technically, we might take our cue from Nodelman and Behrendtand ask questions about how the visual elements work rhetorically, thatis, how the visual figures influence the reader’s sense of engagementand detachment. The preceding discussion of Disher and Ondaatjesuggests four readily available categories of image/text relations: (1)repetition, (2) reversal, (3) substitution, and (4) destabilization:4

• Repetition can be used merely to illustrate the text, or whenused as a form of visual anaphora, it can add an ironic aspectby moving from simple duplication (visual paraphrase) to mul-tiple representation. Andy Warhol’s celebrity images and miseen abyme representations of photographs within photo-graphs, stories within stories, are examples of such dramaticrepetition. Simple illustration enhances imaginative engage-ment, while the mise en abyme disturbs the narrative flowand encourages the “double reading” described by Nodelman.

• Substitution is suggested by Ondaatje’s image of the emptyframe; the moment we hold up page five to the light and seethe white space fill with words, we experience the rhetoric ofsubstitution. More generally, substitution occurs when the im-age takes on a metonymic relationship to the written text—where the container (or frame) represents the contents,where the image gains meaning by virtue of its association (orcontiguity) with the text. Simple substitution will likely go un-noticed by most readers: Metonymy has become a common-place strategy among advertisers, where a commercial imageis associated with positive qualities, personalities, and/or life-styles. Overt substitution, however, will likely prompt readersto adjust their interpretive schemata and cause initial detach-ment from the narrative.

• Reversal is a form of visual irony, where the image either con-tradicts or recontextualizes the words on the page. Recogniz-ing Ondaatje’s framed white space as both “empty” and mean-ingful suggests an example of reversal in action. Such visual/verbal tension encourages even further reader detachment.


• Destabilization occurs when the repetition, substitution, or re-versal, is pushed to an extreme via hyperbole, ellipsis, irony,or antithesis. When the visual/verbal relationship radicallycontradicts expectations, or quite simply does not make initialsense, the reading experience becomes unstable. At such mo-ments, readers tend to force coherence and worry the textsinto meaning.

These categories provide a framework for understanding shifting re-sponse positions.

Attending to these four rhetorical fundamentals suggests one alterna-tive way to detail and talk about reader engagement and detachment;and, as Nodelman suggests, alerting students to such image/text rela-tions can only help encourage the kind of metacognitive awarenessidentified as a prerequisite for literary competence. One excellentway of putting this theory into practice is via the visual mapping ofstories and poems. What I have in mind is a variation of the “plotprofile” activity originally developed by Johnson and Louis to graph-Terry D. Johnson and

Daphne Louis, LiteracyThrough Literature

ically represent the process of character development and change inprose narratives. Working with well-known folktales such as TheThree Little Pigs, Johnson and Louis use a timeline and rating scale tochart the ebb and flow of young readers’ engagement with the story:

Present a blank time/excitement chart and explain the numbering ofthe vertical and horizontal scales: the incidents are plotted in sequencealong the horizontal scale; the excitement level of each incident is ratedon the vertical scale. Then ask the children to select the most excitingincident, in this case the point where the wolf scales the roof of thebrick house (incident 11), and plot it in on the chart (time 4 11; ex-citement 4 10). Next ask for the point of lowest excitement; the open-ing of the story is usually named. From that point onward repeat witheach next most exciting incident, or simply ask for ratings for eachincident in sequence. There may be some discussion on ratings but inearly examples you should try to reach a fairly swift or, if necessary,imposed concensus. (pp. 108–09)

While Johnson and Louis employ the plot profile as a way of teachingpatterning, they also note that the same routine can be used to repre-sent what they call “delicious ambiguities”: they argue that “If areader struggles to represent ambiguities, he or she has already beendrawn into a deep level of engagement with the story” (p. 115). Moreadvanced students working with complex image/text narratives mightwell use the four rhetorical categories to both chart and analyze theirshifting response positions, not only identifying ambiguities but un-derstanding those ambiguities and ironies as legitimate responses tothe “third text” and to the “doubleness” of literature.


Figure 3. Terry Johnson’s graph image. (Reproduced courtesy of Terry Johnson.)

Finally, though, the educational potential of this alternative readingstrategy remains tied to the teacher’s validation of visual/verbal rela-tions—for such validation helps shape response and establishes aclear, institutionally sanctioned interpretive schema. What we learn tovalue often determines what and how we see. With Roger Cardinaland Robert B. Ray we can, as teachers and researchers, move ourterms of critical reference beyond those already established by lan-guage-centered theorists. As Ray puts it, we need to be wary of criti-cal ways of seeing that “define the new technology (photography, film[and image/text compositions]) in terms of the old ([written] lan-guage), and thereby restrict our capacity to admit the full implicationsof the revolution surrounding us” (p. 158). Perhaps the word “revolu-tion” goes too far, for ours is not the first age to feature a visual andperceptual emphasis in popular and high art cultures; it remains none-theless urgent to work out an appropriate critical and pedagogicalresponse to works that present themselves in modes other than thepurely verbal. The “world-as-text” metaphor, when employed too en-thusiastically (or uncritically) by scholars and/or teachers, tends todownplay questions of agency, materiality, and perceptual response.Instead the “literate (i.e., textual) mode,” the art of close reading thewords on the page, should be recognized and taught as simply one ofan array of possible responses—to picture books, literary texts, andother mixed-media constructions.


Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the Social Sciences and Human-ities Research Council of Canada for its support of the research pre-sented here.

Notes

1. A number of critical studies have discussed photography as a metaphor,but very few have discussed the actual photographs and book design.

2. For a more detailed examination of vernacular representation, see my “De-veloping Vernacular Literacies and Multidisciplinary Pedagogies.”

3. Ironically, Kamboureli, careful reader that she is, notes the visual arrange-ment but apparently discounts it as only a textual marker—not a visual one(see pp. 189–90).

4. Claire Dormann sees repetition, reversal, substitution, and destabilizationas the “four fundamental rhetoric operations” of visual rhetoric. See her “ATaxonomy” for a useful overview of how metaphors are used in web de-sign and “user interface.” These four rhetorical commonplaces, usually re-served for stylistic analysis of texts rather than reader response, corre-spond to Aristotle’s topoi on “relationships.” See Corbett, especially pp.94–143; see also Renato Barilli’s Rhetoric. An excellent source for exam-ples of rhetorical analysis is Brian Vickers’s In Defence of Rhetoric.

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Documents

Garry Disher, Michael Ondaatje, and the Haptic Eye: Taking a Second Look at Print Literacy