Guest Speaker: Dr. Kate Flint

1.  On Pedagogy:

Don't take an illustration for granted.  There are 5 criteria to consider when viewing illustrations of any kind:  Context, genre, medium, audience, and reaction from the audience.

Remember that all pictures want something from you. The visual is translated into language; language is "seen" visually.  This is a relationship between inner and outer lives.

Try having students interpret peers' illustrations of text.

Show different images to students of characters and ask questions of "accuracy" and interdependence.  Think about how a visual image can open up a text for the student.  What visuals can we use from today to illustrate ideas in the text? What visuals from the 1850's can we use to represent issues in the text and today?

2. On Dickens

Hard Times was published in 1854 without illustrations.  Published again in 1868 with illustrations done by Fredrick Walker.

A Tale of Two Cities (TOTC) Was published in 1859 with and without pictures.  Many serials came with title pages that had illustrations perhaps setting an expectation, perhaps without the illustrator having read the entire novel.  Sometimes illustrators borrowed from other popular images, from contemporaries, from Punch, from landmarks.

Sometimes we misread illustrations (visual red herrings).  It is important to dig deeper and find out if we are placing our own atmosphere, bias, reading, on to an illustration.  Consider book covers:  What thought goes into choosing cover art?  Why is that important to our reading of the text?  What does the process of cutting, cropping, and coloring the cover art do for our reading?  What about scale? What is the job of the book jacket designer?

Critical reception of TOTC (Phiz illustrations) was negative--overlap of illustration vs. characature shops.  William Hogarth influenced Phiz (Hablot Browne) in the over exaggerated style of illustration.  Phiz and Dickens had a close personal and professional relationship.  Nonetheless, the influence of realism in art had become a middle class trend or desire, so readers wanted illustrations built on accuracy or "the text."

What role might accuracy of illustrations play in our own classrooms?  Does it matter if illustrations are text based or if they are imagined?  See Harvey piece for ideas on visualization and how individuals form images of text that are essentially personal and perhaps, original.  It is this space that author and illustrator may have a conversation about the text.  Harvey claims that good fiction writers allow for play with these images. Ambiguity may be essential to giving readers the freedom to read text in their own way.

3. Classroom activity

Kate Flint is allowing us access to her entire PowerPoint via Google Drive.

We split into small groups and looked at different illustrations from Hard Times, discussing the author's choices in what to include and what to leave out.  This was coupled with the Harvey reading.