포스트모던 그림책의 미장아빔(Mise-en-Abyme)－나의 빨강책과 시간상자를 중심으로

Abstract

Babara Lehman’s The Red Book and David Wiesner’s Flotsam are the postmodern picturebooks representing the features such as connectivity,reciprocality, and accessibility of the digital world reflectively in the recent radical changes within the children’s literature. The disposition toward postmodernism in picturebooks which appeared in the early 1990s is perceived to have pursued the inter-textuality, dramatization, uncertainty, and playfulness. These two picturebook artists accepted critically the method of ‘mise-en-abyme’in order to forge the picturebook contents implying the miniatured environment of ‘always on society’ by means of internet and mobile devices. ‘Mise-en-abyme’which has already availed itself diversely in the field of the literature, paintings,photographs, and the film arts has been exploited in the postmodern picturebooks by using the diminished little books in the ‘real’ big book or using the reflective picture images in the framed bigger pictures. Now the visual text images in the picturebooks have evolved as the penetrable and dynamic ones owing to the methods of ‘mise-en-abyme’ which opened up the new horizon in the way of the usages of picturebook paper surface spaces similar to the hypertext links in internet cyber space. They enabled he digital native generation readers who are much more familiar with the computer and mobile devices to get into the story world of picturebooks through the medium of the ‘books in the books’ or ‘pictures in the pictures’. On the contrary, thecharacter in the picturebooks and the elements of story are possible to come out into the readers’ real world. In this paper, the historical background and various cases of ‘mise-en-abyme’ which manipulates the multiple layers of spaces in the area of the literature, modern arts, photography arts and movies are introduced, firstly. Then, the aspects are reviewed closely in what manners the inner books, camera and pictures contribute to expand the content spaces in the picturebook and how these ‘mise-en-abyme’ method invite the readers as the co-producers of the semantic analysis in the adopted Lehman’s The Red Book and Wiesner’s Flotsam respectively. Picturebooks of today are the media showing off their high adaptability in the rapid changed media environment. The intensively surveyed ‘mise-en-abyme’in this paper is a meta-fiction device to arouse the multiphony and the mutual subjectivity attributes of digital media. In addition, it is a handheld hypertext implied those of non-lineal and non-affiliated characteristics. Vilem Flűsser, the pioneer of digital media phenomenology once urged that the digital revolution is the revolution of the pictures. Now anybody can forecast the bright future of paper picturebooks is possible only through the picturebook revolution by attempting the incessant radical trials of subverting the hackneyed qualities of the genre conventions.