This comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art takes its technical vocabulary from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It is ridiculous to think of poems, paintings, ...or films as distinct from other things in the world, including people. Talking about art should be contiguous with talking about other relevant matters.
Amélie Nothomb's 1999 novel Stupeur et Tremblements portrays the misadventures, misunderstandings, and misgivings experienced by a Belgian professional in a large, modern Japanese workplace. This ...book is often read as an autobiographical account of the author's Japanese experience and a satirical critique of Japanese society. I argue that, while the narrator is unable to perform the duty for which she was hired, as a translator, she acts as an interpreter of Japanese mores. Always and indelibly perceived within the boundaries of Western culture in the novel, Japan becomes a stylised construct replete with references to Western concepts. My article sheds light on how this construct takes shape in the text by focusing on the narrative techniques that foreground the narrator's immersion in Western culture, including allusions to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, paraphrasing and injecting meaning, namedropping key Western figures and concepts, and using the eye as a recurring motif and metaphor.
This study examines the literary impact of Lewis Carroll's children's books on the history of English children's literature. Susina elucidates the cultural content of Carroll's work and situates the ...Alice books in relation to Carroll's juvenilia, his letters, photographs of children and his attempt to combine children's and adult literatures.
Abstract
The notion of portals to alternative multispaces where normalcy is subverted into magical situations has been a feature of fiction for centuries. Architects and educators
Lara Lesmes and ...Fredrik Hellberg
have catalogued some of these fictive realms and mechanisms, and developed their own augmented‐reality portal to show the results of their research.
Les contes de fées fantastiques victoriens de Lewis Carroll, Les Aventures d'Alice aux Pays des Merveilles (1865) et De l'autre côté du miroir (1871) offrent de nombreuses reformulations fictives de ...la relation ambigue des Victoriens avec les animaux. Le chat de Cheshire, qui disparaît et réapparaít sans cesse, représente les qualités répressives idéologiques et subversives poétiques du langage qui distingue le sujet humain parlant des animaux (Lecercle 1994) ; la course saugrenue menée par le Dodo est une répétition absurde de la lutte sans merci décrite dans la théorie évolutionniste darwinienne (Lovell-Smith 2007), tandis que le loir de la théiere renvoie a la façon dont la possession de certains animaux pourrait indiquer une appartenance a une classe sociale (Ritvo 1987). Ces animaux incarnent une étrange altérité et semblent incompatibles avec le soi humain picaresque d'Alice qui est progressivement déstabilisée par ses nombreux changements de forme, au point d'etre tantôt méprise pour une fleur, un serpent ou une bete mythique. Malgré cela, Carroll décrit son héroine avec des attributs animaliers a connotation positive - elle "aime comme un chien" et elle est "douce comme un faon" (1887) - qui font écho au programme éthique présent dans ses romans ou l'on sent émerger une relation solidaire et égalitaire entre les différentes especes. Leur non-différence est ainsi conçue telle que Derrida l'envisage dans sa vision déconstructiviste et post-humaniste (2008). Partant des enjeux politiques et pragmatiques de l'allégorie animale a l'époque victorienne, cet article démontre comment l'on peut détecter, au sein meme des récits d'Alice, des références au soutien de Lewis Carroll en faveur du droit des animaux, y compris a son engagement contre la vivisection explicitement dénoncée dans ses pamphlets et librement transposée dans des écrits du merveilleux en apparence apolitiques. Lewis Carroll's Victorian nonsense fairy-tale fantasies Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) provide plenty of fictional reformulations of the Victorians' ambiguous relationship with animals. The vanishing and reappearing Cheshire Cat represents language that is ideologically manipulative and poetically subversive and distinguishes the speaking human subject from animals (Lecercle 1994); the Caucus Race led by the Dodo Bird is an absurd rehearsal of the Darwinian evolutionary theory's competitive struggle for survival (Lovell-Smith 2007), while the dormouse in the teapot evokes how the ownership of certain animals could indicate class belonging (Ritvo 1987). These animals embody a curious otherness radically incompatible with the picara's human self gradually destabilized by Alice's numerous shape-shiftings which elicit her misidentification as a flower, a serpent, and a mythical beast. Carroll's own description of his heroine with positive animal attributes, 'loving as a dog' and 'gentle as a fawn' (1887) resonates with an ethical agenda outlined in his novels starting out from the multidimensional interspecies relationship that conceives of difference in a non-dualistic, posthumanist deconstructive, Derridean (2008) way. Focusing on pragmatic, political stakes of Victorian animal allegory I unveil in the Alice tales references to Carroll's support of animal rights, including his anti-vivisectionist commitment explicitly spelt out in his pamphlets and gaining fictional manifestations in his seemingly apolitical fantasies.
In the summer of 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church in Oxford, Charles Dodgson--better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll--dressed the six-year-old Alice Liddell in ragamuffin's clothes, and ...then snapped the camera's shutter. In The Alice Behind Wonderland, Simon Winchester uses the famous photograph of Alice as the launching pad for an appreciative energetic and penetrating look at the inspiration behind, and the making of, one of the greatest classics of children's literature. Indeed, Winchester shows that Dodgson's love of photography deeply influenced his view of the world, helping to transform this shy and half-deaf mathematician into one of the world's best-loved observers of childhood. Much like the fictional Alice's world, as the photograph is subject to closer examination, 'Alice Liddell as The Beggar Maid' becomes curiouser and curiouser, capturing a moment during a golden afternoon that would endure forever. 'Alice Liddell as The Beggar Maid' was, in short, the muse that would inspire the creation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Deftly engaging with Dogson's published writings, private diaries, and photography, Winchester weaves together the poignant, turbulent, and entirely fascinating story behind Lewis Carroll and the making of his Alice. Acclaim for Simon Winchester "An exceptionally engaging guideat home everywhere, ready for anything, full of gusto and seemingly omnivorous curiosity." --Pico Iyer, The New York Times Book Review "A master at telling a complex story compellingly and lucidly." --USA Today "Extraordinarily graceful." --Time "Winchester is an exquisite writer and a deft anecdoteur." --Christopher Buckley "A lyrical writer and an indefatigable researcher." --Newsweek.
Analysing Lewis Carroll's Alice books in the context of children's literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, Ronald Reichertz argues that Carroll's striking originality was the ...result of a fusion of his narrative imagination and formal and thematic features from earlier children's literature. Drawing examples from a wide range of children's literature Reichertz demonstrates that the Alice books are infused with conventions of and allusions to earlier works and identifies precursors of Carroll's upside-down, looking-glass, and dream vision worlds. Key passages from related books are reprinted in the appendices, making available many hard-to-find examples of early children's literature.
Through their juxtapositions of strangeness and paradox with familiarity and everydayness, the Surrealists' vision changed the world. It has certainly transformed the work of Perry Kulper, an ...architect and Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. Citing his influences, which extend back over half a millennium to proto‐Surrealists such as Hieronymus Bosch, he presents some of his recent drawings on themes ranging from a digital exquisite corpse to a metaphorical resort proposal for birds.
Based at Troy in Upstate New York, the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is directed by Dean Evan Douglis. He describes the school's worldview and the challenges that ...architecture must help to solve. Evoking the influence of characters such as Lebbeus Woods and Buckminster Fuller on the school's mission, he takes us on a journey through some of the recent high points of the student output in his professional and graduate research programmes.
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