ENG 208 - Reading Alice in Wonderland

1 course unit

This course investigates Lewis Carroll’s Alice books - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - in themselves and as they are transformed into a larger cultural “Alice Myth” with a life of its own. The course examines these texts in a variety of cultural and aesthetic frames. These are primarily British and Victorian, considering the Alice books as children’s stories, as dream-texts, and as complexly comic representations of gender, class, and childhood. In addition, the course will consider the relation between the texts and their author, who led a triple life as Charles Dodgson, Oxford don in mathematics, as the writer Lewis Carroll, whom Dodgson never acknowledged, and as one of the fathers of photography, a famous portrait photographer. In the latter part of the course we will pursue the afterlife of the Alice Myth up to the present day. We will look at adaptations of the books, film versions by the surrealist Svankmajer and by Disney, and perhaps the video game based on the Alice books.
Meets departmental Transformations approach.
Meets general academic requirements HU and W.