Gazes through Spaces

Readers navigating the multimodal architecture of picturebooks.

Vortrag von Ben Dammers auf der virtuellen Konferenz der Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) 2025: „Shortcuts and Tesseracts:  Time/Space in Children’s Literature and Culture“ (9.-14. Juni 2025)

The paper examines the material book as a spatial construct, highlighting the relationship between the physicality of literary texts and the spaces they depict. Children’s literature, characterized by multimodality and playful engagement with materiality (Boyken 2022; Müller-Wille 2019), offers a particularly rich field for exploring these dynamics. By analyzing how textual and visual elements interact with the book’s physical form, this study reveals how material and conceptual dimensions coalesce to shape distinct spatial experiences for readers.
Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of diagrams (Peirce 1998; Stjernfelt 2007), the analysis explores how spatial and temporal relationships manifest within the medial space of selected picturebooks (Barnett & Klassen 2014; Davies 2015; Minhos Martins & Carvalho 2014). The study demonstrates how layout, sequencing, and page transitions structure the reader’s navigation and perception of time.
Additionally, empirical data from an eye-tracking study (Dammers 2024) illustrate how the spatial architecture of the book guides the reader’s gaze, providing insights into engagement patterns and interactive affordances. This integration of spatial theory, semiotic analysis, and empirical data deepens our understanding of how multimodal texts orchestrate spatial and temporal dimensions, shaping the reader’s navigation and engagement.