Alice in Wonderland
Posted on August 19, 2007
Filed Under Reading, Teaching |
I’m rereading Alice this week because I’m going to teach it in my first-year course this semester. What has struck me on this reading is not just the irrationality of the adult world from Alice’s point of view, but its stupidity & ugliness. The main themes of the course are childhood & adulthood, chaos & order, authenticity & alienation. Before Wonderland, though, we are going to spend a few days with Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience & Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” & T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which carries Wordsworth’s poem to its logical conclusion. I’ll then use Alice & Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees as a way into Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time & Nick Hornby’s About a Boy. We’ll conclude with Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. Alice, though, is the pivot upon which the course will turn.
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4 Responses to “Alice in Wonderland”
Stumble it!
PIVOT ALICE
Taking space
makes time apart
that part I get
but if a mind was once
what a diamond’s coal for today
we would not be having
this delusional charade
where the bully always rises
to the top before he’s stopped
while that pale orchid justice
blooms its few amazing seconds
every hundred years or so even if
every day we misted down the leaves
we turned it gently every week.
Sounds like a great course. Fascinating to use something as current as Haddon.
The Haddon was my university’s summer reading book for incoming freshmen this year.
Great to see such current literature being treated in undergraduate education. Seems like literary criticism has been allergic to anything published in its own century, just in case it didn’t end up standing the test of time. But making the connection between old warhorses and hot-off-the-press literature is critical to our understanding of continuity in the literary tradition.