The bedtime story wars: children’s picturebooks as parodic advocacy

ABSTRACT

A growing force in children’s literature, public figures’ crossover picturebooks are designed to appeal to adults and children alike. This study takes a critical look at the crossover picturebooks of John Oliver and Stephen Colbert. As forms of parodic advocacy, their books use the doubled worlds of parody to invite audiences into corrective spaces, highlighting the influence at work in the seemingly persuasion free media of children’s books, while simplifying and expanding the issues at stake through a multimodal form of activism. In particular, we add to the literature on political parody a focus on the potential for such discourses to function metanoically – alternating between original and parodied texts to engage in political revisions while forwarding moral visions on behalf of disadvantaged others. Parody and metanoia jointly invite engagement in the hope of doing something different and restoring political options through re-energized design.

KEYWORDS:

• Parody
• advocacy
• metanoia
• narrative
• recursion
• children

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Don Waisanen

Don Waisanen (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is a Professor in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York. All of his projects focus on public and leadership communication, civic engagement, and democracy-building perspectives and skills.

Amy Becker

Amy B. Becker (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore, MD. Her research examines public opinion toward controversial issues, the implications of new media technologies, and the political effects of exposure and attention to political entertainment including late night comedy.