Recontextualization Of Death Discourse

The children’s picture books on death education combining images and texts play an important role in the social practice of death education.Children’s picture books on "death",as a product of the social action of death,reproduce the related social practices and generate new meanings.In the meanwhile,the meanings of death constructed in picture books subconsciously affect or even change children’s perceptions of death.Based on Painter et.al’s(2012)framework of visual narratives and van Leeuwen’s(2008)interpretation of recontextualization,this thesis aims to analyze and interpret the image and text modalities of children’s picture books,and explore the ideational meanings and meanings of death constructed in children’s picture books.The thesis selects two original picture books from Taiwan in China as the research data,and examines the ideational meanings through image and text modalities from three dimensions,namely,the depicted participants,the inter-event relations and the inter-circumstances.By analyzing the specific strategies deployed by the discourse producers engaged in the social practice of death education,this study reveals that the death discourse constructed in picture books is a recontextualized imaginary practice.The research found that: Firstly,the ideational meaning constructed through image and text modalities is in agreement with the intention of the picture books.For one thing,in terms of the depicted participants,the characters’ complete manifestation is often used for the first appearance of a character,while the metonymic manifestation is exploited for the expression of special meanings.It is worth noting that the relationship between characters is also one of the factors in constructing different meanings of death.For another,death events are often narrated in the option of temporal [succession] to satisfy children’s cognition and understanding of the death process.In the end,in terms of the inter-event circumstances,the two picture books use different ways of depicting circumstances and construct different meanings of death.Secondly,through the specific representations of visual and verbal modes,the meanings of death constructed in children’s picture books are mainly divided into three categories:(1)death is parting;(2)death is continuation,which contains two subcategories,namely "death is the continuation of soul" and "death is the continuation of memory";(3)death is the end.Thirdly,the image modality and the text modality are consistent in specific representations,and the representational feature is the warmth of death.Besides,this recontextualized death discourse has nothing to do with death,but is constructed as a non-objective corporeal continuation,thus manifested as a glorified death.