Magistra Iadertina, Vol. 17 No. 2, 2022.
Original scientific paper
THE MULTI-LAYEREDNESS OF THE ILLUSTRATED BOOK OTOK (THE ISLAND)
Vladimira Rezo
orcid.org/0000-0003-1446-4896
; Faculty of Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb
Abstract
Otok (eng. The Island), an illustrated book, depicts a dystopian future of an unnamed Croatian island. Grandma, the main heroine and narrator, welcomes her granddaughter Zrinka, who arrives by boat from Zagreb. The majority of the island has sunk, and the remainder is inhabited by a few elderly people. Former Mediterranean vegetation has vanished, there are no animals, the sea is poisonous and greasy, the land is poisoned and barren, and the sky is cloudy but devoid of rain. The goal of this paper is to determine which issues emerge in the illustrated book and how they are depicted, as well as to evaluate aesthetic characteristics of the story. The importance of narration in the book cannot be overstated - two stories are told from Grandma’s point of view: the story of the dystopian present (told in the present tense), which is the opposite of Grandma’s melancholy story of the past and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of Thumbelina. Thumbelina is also the main intertext of the illustrated book, which is dominated by a romantic concept of childhood (the kind that Grandma remembers). That image of childhood contrasts with Zrinka’s posthumanist childhood, which is represented by a completely altered Little Red Riding Hood in the form of a computer game.
Keywords
dystopian world; environmental issues; technologisation; concepts of childhood; intertextuality; Thumbelina; Little Red Riding Hood
Hrčak ID:
292498
URI
Publication date:
24.12.2022.
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