Abstract
The framework of visual grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006, via Serafini, 2014) is used to examine the artwork of Laurie Halse Anderson and Emily Carroll’s Speak: The Graphic Novel, which tells through words and pictures the story of Melinda Sordino, a girl who is raped just prior to beginning her freshman year in high school. Three key sets of images that depict the various dimensions of Melinda’s silence are analyzed in order to demonstrate how Carroll’s images, in conjunction with Anderson’s text, work to convey Melinda’s ongoing trauma and eventual recovery: Melinda’s artwork, the various mirrors that appear in the book, and the abandoned janitor’s closet that Melinda transforms into her private refuge. The overall purpose of the paper is not to compare the original novel with the graphic adaptation, but rather to interrogate how—and how effectively—Carroll is able to depict silence, and Melinda’s eventual triumph over silence, through the visual grammar of pictures. The paper argues that the visual grammar instructs us in how to read the images, which ultimately work to show us what Melinda cannot tell us.
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Don Latham is a professor in the School of Information at Florida State University. His research focuses on information behavior of young adults, digital literacies, and young adult literature. He is co-editor of Literacy Engagement Through Peritextual Analysis in the Classroom (ALA/NCTE, 2019), The Information Literacy Framework: Case Studies of Successful Implementation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and From Text to Epitext: Expanding Students’ Comprehension, Engagement, and Media Literacy (forthcoming from Libraries Unlimited). He has received research grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the ALAN (Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the NCTE) Foundation, the FSU Council on Research and Creativity, and the FSU College of Communication and Information.
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Latham, D. Picturing Silence: The Visual Grammar of Speak: The Graphic Novel. Child Lit Educ 53, 169–181 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-021-09436-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-021-09436-x