“Alice through the Magnifying-Glass: Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Sciences of the Mind” (original) (raw)
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“They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care”: Lewis Carroll Studies, 2004–2017
Dickens Studies Annual, 2018
Recorded in this essay is the sweep of Lewis Carroll scholarship covering 2004–2017. New Primary Works; Critical, Annotated or Notable Editions; Reference Works; Biographies; Journals and Websites; Book-length Studies; Collections of Essays; and Selected Journal Essays and Book Chapters are covered. During the period discussed, diverse interest in Lewis Carroll and his works increased steadily and was extensive, more in evidence than for many if not most Victorian writers. The topics of interest related to this multitalented man—literature, photography, biography, mathematics and logic, Victorian cultural studies and more, and seen from many critical and thematic perspectives—have become increasingly broad and accepted as worthy of study of a major figure, and his Alice books established as major texts of world literature.
This paper rereads Lewis Carroll’s Alice-stories from a Lacanian psychoanalytical perspective, building on Lacan’s suggestion to see them as an “epic of the scientific era”. Lacan notably correlates Carroll’s stories with the work of Jean Piaget, considering them far more revealing and ground-breaking than Piaget’s scientific contributions. Moreover, whereas Carroll’s treatment of language, logic and mathematics in his academic writings remains fairly traditional, it is in his stories that he anticipates the epistemic upheaval affecting a range of research fields (from 1900 onwards), from logic, mathematics and linguistics up to experimental psychology and even psychoanalysis. First, I will cast Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as the experiences of a research subject inside a laboratory setting, where laboratory props are sublimated into “objects of desire”. Subsequently, I will address the topological dimensions of the tales, i.e. the functioning of space and time, elaborating Lacan’s claim that Carroll’s Alice-stories open-up a modernistic, surrealistic, post-Euclidian spatiotemporal ambiance. Next, I will read Alice’s adventures as a journey through mindscapes while conducting psychedelic trials. And finally, I will discuss a cinematic Alice-version where Wonderland becomes a psychiatric ward. Each section serves to demonstrate not only how Lacanian psychoanalysis allows us to correlate Carroll’s stories with experimental psychology and neuroscience, but also how Carroll’s literary mirror reveals the continuing relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the current era of ‘big’ brain research.
Lewis Carroll’s "Alice" books : a new perspective
2010
Defining the Concept My paper deals with an analysis of Lewis Carroll's Alice s Adventures in Won derland and Through the Looking-Glass from a schema theory perspective. This approach provides me with the perfect tool for analysing these ambiguous and controversial texts. The concept of schema theory can be best defined as "a body of ideas which has passed from psychology, through Artificial Intel ligence (Al) and into discourse analysis" (Cook 1994: 9). In the first part of my article I will define schema theory giving a brief description of its origins, general principles, terminology and main concepts. Although the notion of schema theory as a mental representation can be traced back to Kant's Criteria of Pure Reason (1787) (the German word is also schema) the origin of modem schema theory can be found in the Gestalt psychology of the 1920s and 1930s (Cook 1994: 9). Its basic argument is that a new experience is understood by comparison with a stereotypical version of a similar experience kept in memory (Cook 1994: 9). The new experience is then defined in terms of its deviation from stereotypical version or conformity to it. The theory can be applied not only to the processing of sensory data, but also to the processing of any written text (Cook 1994: 9). Both Semino (1995) and Cook (1994) noticed an increased interest in the application of schema theory to the analysis of literary readings. This has resulted from the awareness of the connection between "background knowledge and interpretation variability" (Semino 1995: 84). According to Muske quoted in Semino, the attractiveness of schema theory to literary scholars resides mainly in the fact that it offers a flexible framework "within which to investigate the interplay between reader's knowledge of the world and texts in literary comprehension" (1995: 84). Cook (1994: 15) distinguishes three main types of schemata: world, text, and language schemata. By world schema one must understand schematic representation of the world e.g. conference schema; by text schema, schematic representation of certain text types. For example, diary writing obeys certain text brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
2015
The aim of this article is to establish a dialectically reasonable approximation of Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There (CARROLL, 1871) with Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1977) through queer theory in order to discuss the problematisation of normative identity constructs. People who are inserted in the queer condition are forced into a model wherein there is no possibility of future, since they are intrinsically part of something that, different from the hegemonic normative pattern, has no possibility of thriving nor evolving. Therefore, in order to provide a new epistemological approach to such queer sociality, we are persuaded by the writings of Lewis Carroll (1871) because of his geniality in providing alternative structures for the human psyche by deconstructing normative definitions and functioning for such psyche. His ability to talk about the repressive states of identity his characters face, and ho...