Congratulations to Dr. Caleb Davis, who successfully defended his dissertation on August 20!

 Caleb Davis’s dissertation, Reading Double: Focalization, Myth and Master Narrative in German Children’s Picturebooks 1931-1940, analyzes how children’s picturebooks from the National Socialist era used visual language to communicate ideology to Germany’s youngest readers.

Building on research on master narratives and visual semiotics, the dissertation shows how images that condense core cultural stories, what Roland Barthes calls myths, become narrative resources in the visual stories the picturebooks tell. In particular, the dissertation emphasizes the important role played by what narratology terms focalization: the perspective from which the story is presented, or “who sees” the story’s action. It argues that analyzing focalization in picturebooks reveals narrators’ ideology and illuminates how master narratives are communicated.