Imagine discourse between the arts in which the conventions of what we might call ordinary cognition do not apply, on site of intense lobbying neither tethered by history or cultural integrity, nor, frequently, concerned with social cohesion or communicative norms. It will be discourse in which the categories of an imperial culture are abrogated (however temporarily) by an indigenous one, yet it will undoubtedly also be site of intense colonization. On it, likewise, there will be an appropriation of language on an unprecedented scale. Past experience will play little part. Memory short and episodic, rather than semantic. It primal discourse. Primal in that it the site of first contact. Primal also in that it most often considered be the meeting of primitive culture and an advanced. Primal, likewise, in behavioral sense: in it, the satisfaction of physiological needs tantamount. Indeed, body and mind here are in state of kinetic unrest. This scene of prolonged immat urity, yet ontological and epistemological questions held in private language are encouraged be made public. Here the verbal arts have no canon. Literature has no prevailing cultural standard of merit. Questions of the popular and the high cultural are not naturalized and the fictional and nonfictional carry the same degree of verisimilitude as works of propaganda, rhetoric, and didacticism. In modem times, the West has become the site of this tenacious yet frequently unacknowledged imperial discourse, the discourse between multifarious forms of artistic representation win the attention of children. It in such discourse that the picture book located. 1 Arguing the need for critical language for the discussion of children's picture books, Peter Hunt suggests that to pictures into the same mould as words seems be potentially unproductive, except in terms of establishing conventions, when, of course, it is, by definition, necessary (181). It impossible, however, conventionalize pictorial representation the same degree as linguistic representation. Linguistic systems are mastered painstakingly, piece by piece, referent by referent, word by word. Pictorial systems, by contrast, are mastered all at once; they involve what Flint Schier has called natural generativity and are therefore much less conventional than linguistic systems. Each system, nevertheless, relies on general agreement and on willingness engage in communicative activity: the pictorial system on deep recognitional capacities that link object and its picture, the linguistic system on lexical and syntactical regularities and rules. In the media-saturated culture of the contemporary West, the commonalities and differences of our separate but shared experiences are frequently offered up in televisual or hypertextual format in which what Hunt describes as force set of discursive practices that address and interpellate both adults and children as potential viewers or listeners. The linguistic and the pictorial are frequently experienced as synergistic or polylogic systems bound up in this mass media, media whose intention, according Jean Baudrillard, transcribe the complexity of contemporary life into an ongoing procession of meaningless simulacra, hyperreal, a real without origin or reality (2). Baudrillard's disenchanted vision of postmodernity, articulated most profoundly in the late 1970s and 1980s, produced an interesting ontological metaphor. Disneyland, he claimed, is there conceal the fact that it the 'real' country, all of 'real' America, which Disneyland (just as prisons are there conceal the fact that it the social, in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which carceral). Disneyland presented as imaginary in order make us believe that the rest real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation (25). …