Juul y Jesús Betz: Experiencias genuinamente literarias para un proceso de maduración

Abstract

Juul and Jesus Betz are two picture books of a great value aesthetic and literarily, and both can be considerated an important resource for a child who is living his or her own process of building an identity. Both of them promt a strong identification on a reader and are able to induce a catharsis on him. But each one of them do it in a different way. Jesus Betz does it by a extreme verisimilitude, and even when the elements of the plot could seem implausible, the reader can't but believe in its reality. The experience of reading Jesus Betz, more than reading a book, resembles to atrend a play: the audience forget about themselves and are inmersed in the story.
Juul promt catharsis in a very different way: by means of the pictures, it reveals the semiothic nature of the character, Jul, and proscribes any naif identification by the reader. The strong emotion that it provokes doesn't come from anything lived or remembered but from the work of art itself.