From Cover to Cover: Every Cover has a Story

Abstract

Reading is a visual and mental communication between a reader and a text because the reader's knowledge, experience and expectation help fill the gaps within an incomplete text. Namely, the reader's visual and mental communication with the text requires supplemental information such as personal experience, perspective, interest and knowledge so that the incomplete narrative presenting instructions for the reader can be interpreted. In the communication between the reader and the text as Wolfgang Iser asserts "the reader plays a more creative role in the interpretation of the text because the text provides guidance and instructions but places limitations on its own interpretation. Thus, for Iser the reader plays a more active participation on part of both the text and the reader in interpretation and creation of rich meaning. Iser's approach referred to as "biactive approach" is based on the communication between the reader and the text in which the reader's own experiences and supplementary information is required in order to create meaning (Booker 45). Even the cover of the book that opens the doors to the deeper meaning hidden between the lines within the pages requires a biactive participation because the first communication between the text and the reader starts with the representation of the cover that lures the reader into the elicitation and interpretation of the narrative discourse. The cover that has a "pictorial story" rather than a "fictional expression" establishes the visual communication between the reader and the text at first sight. In the frame of Iser's "biactive approach" the covers of Toni Morrison's novels published in USA and translated in Turkey will be compared and contrasted focusing on the cover images and the biactive participation between reader and book covers that tell stories of their own extratextual realities differing from cover to cover.