‚Don‘t Cross the Line!‘

Correspondence of Medial and Diegetic Liminality in the Picturebook

Vortrag von Ben Dammers auf dem 27. IRSCL Kongress 2025 mit dem Kongressthema „Borders, Migration and Liminality in Children’s Literature“ 21.-25. Juni 2025, Salamanca/Spanien

Picturebooks often address their own materiality and mediality. They tend to play with their medial borders. This play has an inherent metaleptic quality (cf. Müller-Wille 2019:24), as diegetic and medial space are related to each other and the ontological separation of the two spheres is blurred. The paper discusses this phenomenon with Jurij Lotman’s concept of the plot (sjužet) (cf. Lotman 1977:231) and examines Don’t Cross the Line! (port. Daqui ninguém passa!) by Isabel Minhós Martins / Bernardo P. Carvalho (2014) as an example of a picture book that consistently interweaves diegetic and medial liminality.