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Promising the Future: Environmental Temporalities in Contemporary Picturebooks
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- Author / Creator
- St. Pierre, Charis
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This thesis considers how time is described and experienced in a small selection of popular picturebooks. Ecocriticism argues the importance of considering temporal modes of life which operate outside human scales of movement, progress, and capital. As such, this thesis begins by considering whether picturebook narratives grounded in linear or cyclical ideas of time allow for a more useful response to ecological concerns. It then takes up a phenomenological methodology to ask how the material picturebook format mediates the experience of time passing by correlating the time of the character(s) to the time of the reader. Finally, it considers three explicitly environmental picturebooks, showing how the futures they advocate are grounded in temporally impossible hopes of returning the world to a past state. Taken together, these explorations of picturebook temporality suggest that time is represented most accurately— and environmentally usefully—when focus is placed on sustainable present processes rather than specific hopes of future stability. As such, the project concludes by advocating that environmental picturebooks focus less on idealized destinations or specific future goals, and more on the sorts of sustainable processes here and now which will serve children regardless of their climate future. It moreover suggests that the most realistic and useful depictions of picturebook temporality happen during reader interaction, when time is not represented as a stable line, cycle, or spatial schema, but rather kept in flow, inviting the reader to collaborate with the narrative in real time.
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2023
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Arts
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.