Innovation in Language Learning
Story Hierarchies and Visual Narratives: Aristotelian Plot, Rumelhart’s Story Grammar, and the Visual Imagination in Dale Peck’s Drift House
Z I Mahmud, Satyawati College, University of Delhi (India)
Abstract
This chapter examines Dale Peck’s Drift House as an intermedial children’s narrative in which literary storytelling, graphic illustration, visual composition, and figurative language collaboratively produce meaning. Bringing Aristotle’s Poetics into dialogue with David E. Rumelhart’s hierarchical model of story structure, the study investigates how narrative coherence is generated through the ordering of events, characters, conflicts, settings, and resolutions, while also asking how such hierarchies are transformed when verbal narration encounters visual representation. Aristotle’s emphasis on the patterned organization of action provides a classical account of plot as an intelligible whole, whereas Rumelhart’s story-grammar model enables a more structurally differentiated understanding of how readers recognize and organize narrative episodes. Drift House serves as the close-reading anchor through which these frameworks are extended beyond exclusively verbal narrative: its imaginative world demonstrates how illustrations can function not merely as decorative accompaniments to text but as parallel narrative agents that establish atmosphere, spatial relations, character perception, temporal movement, and emotional emphasis. The chapter further considers Peck’s figurative language—especially metaphorical, imagistic, and personifying modes—as a verbal counterpart to pictorial invention, creating a reciprocal dialogue between what the text says and what the artwork makes visible. By reading literary narration and creative artwork as mutually constitutive rather than hierarchically separate forms, the study argues that children’s literature invites a multimodal mode of narrative cognition in which story is simultaneously constructed through plot, language, image, and imaginative participation. Drift House therefore offers a productive case for reconsidering classical and cognitive theories of narrative within contemporary visual children’s literature.
Keywords: Dale Peck; Drift House; Aristotle; Rumelhart; children’s literature; visual narrative
REFERENCES
[1] Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath. Penguin Classics, 1996.
[2] Peck, Dale. “The Golden Locket.” Drift House: The First Voyage. Bloomsbury USA, 2005, pp. 87–109.
[3] Rumelhart, David E. “Notes on a Schema for Stories.” In Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science, edited by Daniel G. Bobrow and Allan Collins, Academic Press, 1975, pp. 211–236.
