Literary articles - Lewis Carroll 2024

Back to the Future with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Sandy Feinstein

I. Introduction

I first taught Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a Teaching Assistant in Mr. Rosenbloom's Radical Fiction course at Indiana University in the late 1970s. The focus of the course was, loosely, experimental literature. Though Mr. Rosenbloom's approach did not engage with the politics of the day, national or campus, he was introducing students to what for them would be “radical,” what he identified as the “root” sense of structure: non-linear narratives, meta-texts, works that embedded multiple media, to name a few. A general education course in literature that focused on this “impractical” topic could then attract over 200 students. Now, in a new millennium, universities are acutely aware of dropping enrollments in literature courses of all kinds (Irwin).

As the times have changed, so has my teaching of Carroll's novel, which can still be called “radical” for reasons other than those defined more than forty years ago by a popular professor. Since that first teaching experience, I have adapted Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to varying pedagogic needs and purposes: I have taught it as experimental fiction in Denmark and as children's literature in Kansas, as Fantasy Fiction in a genre course and as part of an interdisciplinary research component in combined Introduction to Literature and Composition courses in Pennsylvania, where I have taught for the past sixteen years.

The approach to Carroll's novel we—I, the teacher, and Callista and Alex Moquin, two students who took the course—focus on here addresses the relevance of teaching literature in a time when its “purposefulness” has become an issue, one eliciting deeply personal responses from opinion writers, including Nicholas Kristof's defense of the Humanities that we assigned to our students and Frank Bruni's recollection of his “most transformative education experience” in a Shakespeare class, an experience which he uses to chart changing attitudes to “learning for learning's sake” (A27). While Bruni concludes that his class in literature was in fact a “luxury,” I will argue that literature is precisely how we accomplish the goals touted as so important by those calling for education reform.

Our focus on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, among other works, sought to develop not only reading and writing skills but skills less commonly associated with literature: what Ken Kay calls “Learning and The CEA Critic 77.2 (July 2015): 240–258. © 2015 College English Association.

Sandy Feinstein 241 Innovation Skills” as well as “Life and Career Skills” (14). Under the rubric of “Learning and Innovation Skills,” which Kay puts at the apex of his framework, are included the following: “Creativity and Innovation,” “Critical Thinking and Problem Solving,” and “Communication and Collaboration.” On either side of these central skills, he lists “Life and Career Skills” to the left and “Information, Media, and Technology Skills” to the right (14). Also identified are “21st Century Themes,” which may or may not be as relevant at the end of the century as they are now: these are literacies in Financial, Economic, Business, Entrepreneurial, Civic, Health, Environmental, and Global Awareness areas.

While our theme for the course that included Alice did not explicitly include any of Kay's themes, it was intended to develop the critical thinking skills that would make it possible for students to focus their papers on any of those themes, and many others that, in future decades, may prove more urgent than the ones he lists. Our theme, “Act! Action! Activity!” was, then, a form of pedagogic “Activism.” How Alice in particular served a number of those “21st Century Themes,” “ as Kay calls them, as well as “Learning and Innovative Skills,” is the focus of the approach to Alice we describe below.

I. Context

The combined courses of Honors Composition and Introduction to Literature in which Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was assigned satisfied general education requirements in three areas: writing, humanities, and the first-year seminar. The courses fulfilled six of the required nine honors credits required of first-year Penn State campus honors students. My colleague, Jeanne Rose, and I first offered this course combination ten years earlier, and the 2014 version was the fourth one. Our themes have ranged from “Education,” in our pilot version, followed by one on “Monsters,” and the third on “Nature,” the only one to omit Alice from the reading list. The theme for the course we offered in 2014, “Act! Action! Activity!” embedded process and methodology into the eponymous theme, making explicit what the first three courses worked toward practicing pedagogically, engaging students actively in their learning.

The course was intended to prepare students for the kind of writing they might do in their next four years, including research papers, honors theses, the kinds of statements of purpose required by graduate schools, competitive internships and scholarships, among other academic and practical demands. Therefore, we assigned proposals and papers requiring bibliographies, hypotheses, articulated methodologies, and conclusions or results. We intended our six-credit course to prepare students for the rest of their academic lives, whatever their majors or intended careers. In this course, as with earlier ones, students had declared majors or ambitions primarily in science and technology, though some would change both by the end of their first semester.

I begin with this background to emphasize the many different thematic and practical contexts to which we put Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It may not come as a surprise to those familiar with Charles Dodgson's background as a mathematician to learn that his novel, published pseudonymously with his now famous name, is particularly well-suited to the teaching of writing across the disciplines, which our writing assignments implicitly and explicitly required. Carroll's multilayered fantasy lends itself to numerous “active” assignments, making it an ideal work with which to begin, especially for those college instructors who struggle with how to make reading “active” to students. The “alternative” assignments we used to teach Carroll's novel are also transferable to other literary and even non-literary texts without the scaffolding of our entire course or any one work, including Alice; indeed, I have used many of the same methods in my Arthurian course.

Methodologies/Approaches

A. Thematic
The theme, “Act! Action! Activity!” distilled our methodology in three words that reminded students and teachers to engage in active learning, reading, and teaching. In our syllabus, we explained that the reading and writing assignments would provide “opportunities to approach Acts, Actions, and Activities from various interdisciplinary perspectives.” This part of the course description informed both the active assignments we used to teach the novel and the writing assignments about it. The assigned paper on Alice required students to look at the novel through the lens of their discipline. There would be numerous journal exercises and in-class activities leading up to this paper, which would challenge students to see both their disciplines and the novel in, we hoped, new and exciting ways. The paper and supporting assignments asked students to think critically and creatively. We did not want computer science majors, for example, to use the novel to generalize about the field or use it to compare and contrast the two but to apply the theories of their discipline and, in so doing, communicate an understanding of the novel from an unaccustomed angle or context specific to a particular discipline. To do so successfully would require analytical reading and writing creativity.

B. Research
There is a wealth of scholarship exploring Carroll's novel from seemingly disparate points of view. Richard Kelly, for one, begins his introduction to his scholarly edition of the novel by emphasizing this point: Although Lewis Carroll originally told the story of Alice's adventures in Wonderland explicitly to entertain three young children, the tale evolved into a book that has become a treasure for philosophers, literary critics, biographers, clergymen, psychologists, and linguists, not to mention, mathematicians, theologians, and logicians. There appears to be something in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for everyone, and there are almost as many explanations of the work as there are commentators. (9)

A quick glance at the MLA database—421 and counting (30 January 2015)—and at Web of Science—76 results (30 January 2015)—confirms his claims. In short, there were numerous cross-disciplinary models for our students to explore. Our students would add nineteen more “commentators” with nineteen more “explanations” of the work.

The number of publications to be found could, on the one hand, be intimidating; on the other, no student could fail at finding something related to his or her interest. The lesser challenge concerned finding scholarly articles that would best suit the students' level of understanding in their chosen field as well as of the novel. The greater challenge concerned the use of the scholarship: synthesizing it, responding to it, agreeing or disagreeing with it. Both research and literature require close reading skills. Teaching students how to read closely, then, would also be one of our goals. Tests, journal assignments, and in-class activities specifically sought to reinforce this skill, as we shall see.

While students had read imaginative literature prior to the course, few, if any, had read scholarly articles. Not to belabor the common observation regarding the internet, but it was clear the default search tools were Google and the “hit” that invariably pops to the top, Wikipedia. These resources can be useful, as we know,1 but they are one among many resources, the use of which depends on audience and purpose. Therefore, another goal was to teach students how to differentiate research tools and the different ways they can be used: every assigned paper required some form of research. The research for the Alice paper was the most demanding and sophisticated. This paper was intended to reinforce and continue development of research skills through the use of scholarly databases, including Project Muse, JSTOR, and MLA, as well as those in students fields that could be found among the many in the Penn State system's Lion Search. Locating sources is a comparatively minor challenge, however, compared with figuring out how to read the texts found and then determining their usefulness. Suffice it to say, once students had waded through a difficult scholarly article, they wanted to find a way to use it, whether or not it was actually relevant to their argument. That was the ultimate challenge, knowing what to do with the sources: learning to read them critically in order to master synthesizing, paraphrasing, and responding to them in relation to the argument being made.

C. Problem Solving
For the teachers, Carroll highlighted the challenges of reading as problem solving that we would exploit in our discussions, exercises, and writing assignments. English professors may take for granted theories of reading such as reader-reception and post-modern givens about subject position, but these ideas are still new to most of our students. It is hard for students to grasp, at first, that texts are not fixed in meaning, that culture informs meaning, that language itself is not prescriptive, and that who is reading— when, where, and how—affects apprehension. That reading could mean in a multiplicity of ways—rather than the teacher's or their own—proved disorienting and, therefore, made it difficult to imagine how ideas from one field could be used to understand another. This was the case especially for fields that seemed to have so little in common as twenty-first-century computer science with a nineteenth-century children's novel or “practical” engineering with a fantasy world. Developing an understanding of the relationship between words and numbers, words and signs, characters and systems, setting and environment, would follow, difficult as it might have been to process initially. Our reading and writing assignments were intended as a series of problems students needed to work through in order to complete or “solve” them.

Up to this point in the semester, students may have identified the “problem” as one of honors courses or college-level English courses or their teachers overly “high” expectations, if they thought of the assignments as problems at all. We did not frame the assignments as problems. Indeed, our learning environment in this area may have resembled that of Wonderland: the problems were not explicitly identified, nor was the route to solving them. There were clues in the syllabus, but, like the substances that Alice consumes, they were not completely labeled as modern, medical prescriptions would be: no specific dose was recommended; no side effects identified; no off-label uses made explicit.

D. Creativity
Lastly, we wanted to teach “creativity.”2 We hoped to elicit original thinking and creative adaptation with an assignment that at first might have seemed impossible by undergraduate standards, even for honors students. The challenge is how to teach creative thinking. Can it be taught? My experience suggests that creativity is innate,3 something that can be prompted or provoked, as happens to Alice in Wonderland.

Having students perform texts is active pedagogy, perhaps even “creative” pedagogy. Performing and illustrating texts can create situations where students would seem to have no choice but to be creative in order to accomplish the task. In the act of embodying texts by interpreting them theatrically or visually, meaning is accessed in new ways, through the

Sandy Feinstein 245 physical that may lead students to discovering untapped resources and talents in themselves. Asking students to illustrate or act out scenes and characters, however, is creative within what might be thought the conventional parameters of the arts: acting and drawing are typically referred to as “creative” endeavors, similar to the category of creative writing represented by literature. It is not what reformers like Kay usually mean by “innovative and creative skills.” We, though, wanted to find a way for students to think creatively about their academic areas, not only about literature. It is difficult to think of a better text to use for this purpose than Carroll who, as Charles Dodgson, was a mathematician, photographer, illustrator, and writer in multiple fields, from nursery verse to symbolic logic (Dodgson) and mathematics.4 His integration of math into literature seems as revolutionary as the creation of Wonderland itself.

E. Close Reading
Close reading is a skill to be learned, developed, and refined; similarly, digital and media literacy is a skill to be gained, engaged, and honed. While we sought to direct students to the text and how it means, our approach to close reading extended beyond the printed word and beyond the literary. Learning to read closely would entail learning how to read in different contexts, something about which Carroll was deeply aware while he revised Alice for different audiences5: the first, Alice's Adventures Underground for Alice Liddell, then Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for the larger audience of Victorian children and their parents, and, lastly, in the Nursery Alice for, as he says, “And my ambition now is (is it a vain one?) to be read by Children aged Nought to Five” (1). Additionally, cinematic, television, and gaming adaptations of the novel that were assigned required an awareness of visual rhetoric.

We understood close reading to extend to the reading of sources as well. Because students would be required to use scholarly sources, they would also need to learn how to read and use them. Identifying a scholar's argument was hard enough for students; following the way an argument was made proved harder still and required the ability to read carefully as well as closely. Exposing students to the literature and language of their fields, however basic, was our objective as well. In so doing, students often recognize the gulf between writing assigned—and not assigned—in their classes and the scholarly writing of those in their intended area of study.

The last, if not most important, purpose of close reading emphasized in the course: teaching students how to read their own writing critically. This kind of close reading requires students to step back and look at their writing as if they were reading the work of the scholars they used for their papers. Identifying the argument they sought to make revealed that there might not be an argument but rather a topic with an extended riff on it or paragraphs of unsupported opinions about it. By close reading, then, we are not speaking of seeing the typo that escaped notice in the first three drafts, though it might involve looking at a sentence and how it succeeds— or fails—in accomplishing a specific purpose.

II. Applications

A. Close Reading Alice and Creativity
To begin, we sought to develop a common language we could use to discuss reading and writing. Thus, we emphasized “key words” as a means of introducing students to rhetorical terms relevant to reading understood as academic discourse and literary interpretation, whatever the discipline: for example, “audience” and “authority” or “ethos.” Emphasizing “genre,” we introduced students to the shared and distinct vocabularies of lyric poetry, essay, drama, the novel, and scholarly argument. Genre and audience, in turn, led to discussions regarding reader expectations. The audience for Donne's racy metaphysical poetry was not the same as the one for Carroll's children's book, despite both having the same classroom audience. We read a selection of early modern lyrics closely in light of key words, for example, “image” and “metaphor,” words we would continue to use and add to in reading subsequent texts, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

To make the transition from poetry to Lewis Carroll, we began the unit on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by focusing on the lyric that opens the novel. Juxtaposing the 17th-century lyric with Carroll's opening poem demonstrated different uses of poetic form and their relationship to audience. Carroll's poem offers a context for the story that follows. Its earnest tone and wistfulness contrast the poetic parodies that Alice will recite for various denizens of Wonderland. Our students would engage the novel, in some ways, as Alice had, by not knowing what to expect but by being asked to demonstrate how closely they read the text—and their instruc-tors—by performing for them.

Because we were interested in students focusing on different kinds of texts—verbal and visual—we used exercises that would reveal something about both. These exercises, as the course theme “Act! Action! Activity!” signals, would involve performance of various kinds. For the poem in Alice, that activity, or performance, involved translating the text into images. The poem, unlike the novel, is not illustrated, which gave us a starting point for engaging the work through an alternate medium, one that is central to Alice and to the novel. As Alice says in the first chapter as she look at her sister's book, “What is the use of a book . . . without pictures or conversation?”6

After a general introduction to Carroll and Victorian culture, we divided the students into five groups of three or four each: half or so would try

Sandy Feinstein 247 to draw something mentioned in the lyric poem; the other group would create tableaux vivants, a popular form of entertainment during the period. In addition, the tableaux provided a transition from the preceding unit's reading of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I as both poetry and play, which also involved students performing scenes. Enabled by performance and illustration, we intended to bring certain key words literally to life.

Performance and illustration would exemplify meaning and multiple ways of seeing while at the same time providing a review and reinforcement of terms. On the test that concluded the preceding first unit, it became clear that students did not understand words we had been using, namely “image” and “metaphor” and how those words thicken meaning. Unlike the theatrical reading of paraphrased scenes that characterized their performances of Henry IV, Part I, the tableaux created to represent a scene-snippet of the poem beginning Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—still, mute repre-sentations—served both a dramatic and illustrative function. Additionally, they were a means for checking how well—or whether—the students read the assignment because they created their illustrations and tableaux “off book.”

As each scene was illustrated or enacted, we asked questions to focus the students on narration as well as content, on the details of the poem as well as on its allusions and puns. Questions we posed included the following: Where is the narrator in the poem? How do you know? Who is the narrator with? How do you know? So who is the audience identified in the poem? These questions led to discussions of context, something students struggled with creating in their own writing. In this introductory poem, Carroll offers the context for the story: its oral origins later transferred, by demand, to a written version, Alice's Adventures Underground (Clark 73-74), the precursor of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, both of which we assigned. Reading these two texts together facilitated discussions about audience as part of the context. Audience would be particularly important not only to these two works by Carroll, but to The Nursery Alice, mentioned earlier.

What kind of audience were the students? What was their context? We were challenging their assumptions about how to read a book in English class and what research means at college. To exemplify reading for class, we showed them pages from our marked up copies of Alice and asked to see theirs: few were the underscored or even highlighted pages, never mind notes in the margins. This was one place to start, we explained, especially if they were to keep track of examples of key images and rhetorical devices for themselves. Those concrete examples were what we hoped their performances and illustrations would underline and highlight, it being hard to “perform” or “illustrate” unsupported generalizations. Through these means, we kept discussions focused on actions, characters, images, and other literary features that shape fiction and our ideas about it. It was also how we provided models for writing.

More specifically, we used acting to establish two terms students found difficult both to define and to exemplify, namely authority or ethos and purpose. Therefore, in a second exercise, we asked them to differentiate characters through performance. To prepare for this exercise, we asked students to respond to the following prompt: With which character in Alice did you most identify and why? In other words, if you were a character in Alice, who would you be? Provide a rationale for your choice, then explain how you will perform/adapt/enact this character.

During class, we asked for volunteers to act out the character identified in this assignment, without telling us or their fellow students—their audi-ence—whom they would impersonate. Anyone choosing Alice would be de facto a student-character, anyone impersonating Wonderland characters would be de facto a teacher-character. To understand power relationships and how they play out in interactions, we asked students to set the scene: where are we, teachers and students, in relation to them, the actors? In emphasizing relational space between teachers and students, we asked them to discuss how they were positioning Alice vis-à-vis the figures of authority with whom she interacts. Their final instruction was to show their characters asserting authority, as indicated in the text. The novel, in both words and pictures, shows where Alice “stands” or sits in relation to other characters, for instance, in Tenniel's illustration of Alice and the Caterpillar (83) or at the tea party (103), and the verbal representation of the Duchess, who “Alice did not much like . . . keeping so close to her” (122). In short, read closely, the text provides stage directions. Afterward, we asked the “student audience” how the “actors” accomplished their purpose. Students had little problem representing or identifying the Queen and how she exerted authority. But a concomitant result was that authority became elided with verbal abuse of one kind or another—for example, the violence threatened by the Queen, the verbal sparring of the Caterpillar, or the contrariness of the Mad Hatter. Trying to represent more subtle ideas of ethos would continue to bedevil the students, and, therefore, us, their teachers.

Students understand authority as embodied in teachers and parents, which the various characters of Wonderland can be understood to represent. It was their own authority that they had difficulty claiming as rhetors. Generalizing, whether oral or written, seemed to be an assumed method for establishing authority. This was another motivation for focusing the papers on their academic major or a serious interest if they were undeclared or undecided: it would provide an opportunity for discovering how experts in their field establish authority, one that offered a model for developing their own as authors. The research into one specific aspect of their major this paper required also led them to original readings of Alice.

B. Close Reading: Papers

While our students may initially have expected, or fiercely hoped, that they were producing exemplary work for us, some suspected we might not agree. To ascertain how critically they read their submitted papers, we asked them to respond to the following prompt: grade your paper and explain why you gave yourself the grade you did; then identify the grade you expect us to give the paper and why. Their replies confirmed our suspicions: most awarded themselves higher grades than they assumed we would, but many were able to identify basic reasons why we might not agree with their assessment: not enough information (missing research), too “short” (rather than undeveloped), does not “flow” (rather than organization), language too simple (rather than style). Whatever they suspected, whether or not admitted, none tested the teachers with unconventional or “creative” approaches or styles. As first-semester students, they relied on what had worked in the past; apparently, some were also trying to figure out how much work would really be required of them, as a number of chronic procrastinators admitted.

C. Close Reading: Problem Solving, Research, and Creativity
One basic problem to be solved in a course that served as a first-year seminar intended to introduce students to the expectations of the university and the honors program was how to read a syllabus, how to read teachers, how to take advantage of policies—in short, how to navigate the system. This problem is one that Alice faces in Carroll's work as well as in all the adaptations chosen by students; in one, a game, Alice: Madness Returns, gamers must get Alice safely through the dark underworld that has subsumed Wonderland. If they can get Alice beyond the game's various obstacles, they move forward, and both character and players “win.”

Explicit directions for excelling were on the syllabus: journals could be rewritten for a higher grade if submitted twenty-four hours in advance; all papers submitted on time could be revised and resubmitted for a grade as often as students desired until the penultimate week of class. There were also exhortations in this regard: reminders that students could control their success in the course. Even tests were “negotiable,” though, again, they would have to “solve the problem” of a disappointing test grade—we did not announce that assignments could be made contingent.

As a combined composition and literature course, the assignments themselves posed problems to be solved. By the time we got to the Alice unit, we expected students to have deepened their understanding of what constituted a problem in an assignment. Among the harder problems that students struggled with in their papers was figuring out what a children's novel about a little girl had to do with their twenty-first century disciplines. To begin the process of seeing correlations between their disciplines and the novel, one journal assignment asked students to

... identify something in the text [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or any of the adaptations] that relates to something concrete and specific that is integral to your major. You will need to use at least two scholarly articles on either the aspect of your major that you are exploring in Alice and/or scholarly research on Alice itself.

For some students, the unexpected result of trying to do this assignment was confronting how limited their previous exposure to the theories and concepts of their fields of interest had been. This realization created other problems: figuring out which aspect of their field interested each student the most; determining what aspect of the subject area was relevant to Alice; then locating scholarly resources in the field and narrowing what was found.

Once resources were found, new problems arose: which resources or theories were applicable?; could their ideas be developed past the point of a summary observation, or is the idea too large or complex to compass in a paper not expected to exceed ten pages?; what theories could best be grasped in disciplines they had often only the most modest exposure to; and what part(s) of the novel were most applicable to a particular theory. As Alice discovers, finding one solution can simply lead to a new problem: for example, learning to assert herself at the Mad Hatter's tea party (103-11) nearly leads to her losing her head when she protects the court's gardeners from the Queen (114). The students' search for answers would be a learning expedition, one resulting in their making Alice's Adventures their own.

The novel lends itself especially well to countless disciplines—so well, in fact, that the Cambridge Conference celebrating the 150th anniversary of the novel's publication specifically asked for “papers that examine how text and author have been read in terms of cultural studies, the history of science, the medical humanities, and the politics of literature; and papers considering adaptation and the powerful influence Wonderland has had on design and style” (University of Cambridge CFP). Our students, however, were primarily interested in areas not represented on that list— engineering, business, computer science as well as individual interest in food science, public relations, journalism, psychology, and biology. A few would struggle with finding or understanding ideas or theories in their fields that they could “relate” to Wonderland; they openly questioned how something “real” and so “different” could be used to analyze a fictional text. We assured them it was possible in providing examples of how students before them had solved the problem: we uploaded to the course site two papers that had been published in a Penn State volume of the best first-year papers, one written by an engineering major, another by a psychology major.

Research had been required in every assigned paper, which in the first one had meant learning about different kinds of research, a task especially important in the age of Google. Each succeeding paper added something

Sandy Feinstein 251 new to our requirement for research, the second extending it beyond bibliographic forms, and this one requiring research across at least two fields— literary (scholarship on Alice) and disciplinary (e.g., what do computer scientists do when they code? what have political scientists written about Victorian England?). That the study of literary texts extended beyond the domain of English teachers came as a welcome surprise for some. Still, comprehending the central ideas or methods of their disciplines was no less a challenge than understanding the figurative language and terms of literary scholars.

Students would learn that Alice offers research and analytical opportunities in every discipline. This is, of course, true of all literature; but Alice lends itself particularly well by virtue of its authorship and the range of scholarship supporting this claim for it. Regardless, by using field-specific research—as well as scholarship specifically on Alice—students expanded their knowledge of their intended area of expertise, of research, even of what constitutes evidence and reasoning; they also developed their analytical and rhetorical skills.

As much as this assignment intended to encourage students to come to original readings of the novel, we wanted to provide them with an opportunity to learn more about their fields—because as I have learned from experience since I first used this approach to writing about literature, few students actually have much early exposure to the field they intend to pursue. They know they need to make a living, and they choose fields sometimes based on their strengths (they are good in math) or on a course they enjoyed in high school (drafting, journalism). One objective, then, of asking students to examine Carroll's fiction through the lens of their major, no matter how seemingly strained, was to push them to think creatively about both—the field they planned to pursue and the work of literature they were reading. Reassuring to the engineering students, we did not restrict papers to Carroll's novel; the rest of the unit would revolve around remediations or adaptations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

These “To be Announced” works, as they appeared on the syllabus, would be chosen by the students after we contextualized “remediation.” Students researched available adaptations and “repurposings,” the latter term meaning “to take a ‘property' from one medium and re-use it in another,” in the parlance of the entertainment industry (Bolter and Grusin 338). The term “remediation” we introduced to the class, David Bolter and Richard Grusin define as “the representation of one medium in another” (338). Before students chose the remediated works we would add to the syllabus, we assigned Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Message and his experimental volume with Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, rather than Bolter and Grusin, whom we mentioned in relation to McLuhan. After discussing McLuhan's theories, we asked the students to interact in an online discussion board to vote on the texts to include in the course. The result was the addition of seven works, including Nursery Alice, Sesame Street's Abby in Wonderland; a film created by Callista Miller (with Alex Moquin as Alice), the silent film Alice and Czech Alice; Jefferson Airplane's “White Rabbit,” and the video game Alice: Madness Returns. All but one paper, however, focused exclusively on Carroll's Alice's Adventure in Wonderland; the sole outlier looked at both Carroll and the computer game in terms of audience and “engineered” images of weaponry, specifically the peppermill.

I have described how I, as one of the teachers, taught Carroll's novel with specific objectives in mind, objectives that respond to those Kay argues are central to education in the 21st Century, namely critical thinking and problem solving, communication and creativity. How successfully we met those goals is not mine to judge. More integrally, what was the student takeaway from the course? To address this question, I asked two students whether they would share their experience writing about Alice in their respective disciplines, food science and engineering. Their reflections offer two contrasting approaches to Alice and how they learned from the pedagogic methods described above.

III. Student Experiences

A. Callista Miller: Alice Consuming
Challenging. Impactful. Visionary. Purposeful. These words are just four in a multitude of adjectives that describe the Honors Composition and Introduction to Literature course that I took this past semester with both Dr. Feinstein and Dr. Rose. It never crossed my mind before completing the course I would be describing it in a positive light. Being a food science major, six credits worth of analyzing literature and writing papers was not exactly my idea of an enjoyable class or one that would be applicable to my future; on top of that it was an honors course. I cannot pinpoint exactly what it was that made me decide to stay in the course. Perhaps because it was an easy way of receiving six of the nine required honors credits, or because I liked tackling a challenge, or maybe because I liked the course theme, “Act, Action, Activity.” Whatever reason it may have been, I will simply state that the lessons I have learned in this course will prove invaluable to my future.

The way we incorporated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in this class was particularly beneficial to me. It was not only from the storyline alone that I learned significant concepts, but also the way in which we analyzed this text and remediations of the text through various media, including photos, games, videos, acting, and pictures. For me personally, acting played a big role in what I learned from this course. I never realized before that a text does not have a specific meaning, contrary to what I had always

Sandy Feinstein 253 believed. The idea that literary texts such as Alice are open to interpretation never occurred to me. When we acted out selections of the story, I found it rather humorous at first. I had never been in an English class that incorporated action-based learning before. All fun aside, I learned valuable information from the action-based way in which the text was taught. I learned that the presentation of any given scene is up to interpretation of the director (or, in this case, the actors, my classmates), every one perceives what he or she has read quite differently, environment/setting plays a big part in the way one perceives a scene, gender role and gender switches play a big part in how one perceives character, and the voice, tone and position of the actor/actress's body shows what level authority he or she has in a scene and/or story. In short, I learned that every detail matters and that even the minutest of decisions made in a performance contribute to the viewer's perception of what he or she is watching.

What I took away from this way of approaching Alice was helpful for me in understanding the text itself, but in addition, I will be able to incorporate these lessons in my future career. I am going into a field—food science—where these lessons are extremely applicable, especially when it comes to creating a new product that will go out into the marketplace. When a product is advertised on television, the presentation is important, including who is in the commercial, a pleasing setting, and the excitement and/or sincerity of the voice tone in the commercial, depending on the product. I was pleasantly surprised by how what I learned from acting out Alice could teach me about food marketing or product development.

But, at the time, when the paper on Alice was assigned, I recall being immensely confused. How does one relate her major to a children's story? I must say I am happy that Dr. Feinstein and Dr. Rose did not assign the paper any closer to the end of the semester—it took time, research, questions, and many drafts to figure out what it was that I was supposed to be writing about. Dr. Feinstein kept saying something to me along the lines of, “You have one of the easiest majors to link this story to!” and I would just nod my head and agree, but, honestly, I did not really understand why she said that. Dr. Feinstein and Dr. Rose do not explicitly tell students step by step what they are looking for in any given assignment. I believe they do this partly to see student's ingenuity and to prepare us for the real world where things will not always be explicitly laid out.

“Read us” is what they would often say. This took me the entire semester to understand—I am still learning from them what it means to take complete control of one's grade and what it means to “read” one's professor. It was definitely a change from high school—in public school it was easy street: one followed step by step the detailed instructions set out before her by the teacher and in return received a good grade. The prompt for this paper (or any assignment in this course) was not set up that way.

Food and beverages pop up all around the story of Alice, but I struggled to figure out how I could relate the foods and beverages in the story to the food industry. I recall after my first draft thinking, “Yeah I got this”: I discussed how the quality assurance department in the food industry could use Alice's steps to approaching the food and beverages in the story as a model for how a department utilizes Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP). In response to the paper, I was told that a model is not what they were looking for in this paper. I was back at it, questioning, researching and re-reading parts of the story.

After discovering a model was not what Dr. Feinstein and Dr. Rose wanted, I had no idea what to do. I researched Alice in relation to food. When I asked Dr. Feinstein for guidance she told me to look at the food in Alice through a historical lens—at least that is how I interpreted what she had said to me. Therefore, I researched the food industry during 19th-century England. Then it hit me: food manufacturing was just starting when this book was written, in the 19th century. I realized that Carroll lived in this society of confusion and concern regarding mass production of food, which may have accounted for it being a major component of his story. His main character Alice could represent consumers as a whole through the physical changes she undergoes after eating or drinking. Carroll offers a way for adults to look at the relationship between consumers and food manufacturers that desperately needed regulating. When looking at the historical context, I became aware that the food and beverages in Carroll's novel evoke then current concerns: England's new and dangerous food systems and the relationship between both consumer and food manufacturers.

I was amazed at the links I found. I was especially surprised that I had not found any writing similar to what I had written. I thought it odd that this connection had not been made. That being said, just researching and writing this paper taught me an entirely new way of looking at literature and what can be learned from it. Never in a million years would I have thought about the connections between my major and a children's story, but what amazing relations I made from the connection. I hope to always incorporate in my life what Dr. Feinstein and Dr. Rose have taught me—to connect the seemingly unconnectable. The most creative ideas may come from them.

Within just a few months of embarking on my collegiate career, I was faced with what I considered at times the oddest of challenges, but from these challenges I have gained the most fruitful of experiences. The experiences I had in this class have especially prepared me for my future in science and academia. My goal is to be an effective leader who works toward achieving the prosperity and sustainability of the world's food system. As unexpected as it has been, this class has given me a good foundation to achieve that goal by teaching me to think innovatively and take action on my ideas.

B. Alexander Moquin: Alice Computed

What does it mean to participate in a game? In writing my paper on Alice, I noticed that there were many games that were played throughout the novel. On the one hand, as a mechanical engineering major, I chose perhaps the most physical and literal game: the croquet match. On the other hand, the notion of “game” is a concept that's hard (perhaps impossible) to define, and like Ellis, we'll leave the definition open-ended (381). Nonetheless, even rejecting it as part of a definition of what a game is, Suit's observations of “Game Rules as Not Ultimately Binding” is critical (151). While the concept likely extends to other games in the novel, like wordplay, the croquet match is a case where the rules themselves are being played with: it was all ridges and furrows: the croquet balls were live hedgehogs, and the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches. (117)

All of the instruments of standard croquet have been replaced with a fantastical parallel, while still allowing the player to recognize the game as croquet.

This context being established, the paper I had written for the class attempted to analyze the croquet game in terms of the Hatchuel and Benoit's C-K engineering design theory. I did not realize it at the time, but I was focused on the question: What does participation mean here? Dr. Feinstein and Dr. Rose had told and showed us again and again how to analyze texts we interpreted in a context, not in terms of how we thought the author might have “intended” it, an idea many of us held over from high school. My paper itself represented a grappling with this reconception of authorship. C-K design theory describes essentially a process of discovery, where a map between what is known (knowledge space) and what cannot be deduced (concept space) is drawn and iterated over, so that both knowledge space and concept space are expanded, while evaluating the possible solutions to a problem (Hatchuel and Benoit). To me, it was clear that there was some kind of “design” to the croquet game. However, I had trouble reconciling this new view of the contextual nature of interpretation. Rather than being able to say that Carroll himself “designed” the game for its properties, I found that it was truer to say that the Queen provided a framework for the croquet game.

And yet, we find that the criteria of “design” are not met by the game itself. For while there seems to be a framework for the game, the game itself doesn't follow the framework strictly, and indeed the framework may be manipulated by the players themselves—the Queen and her reshaping of the game is perhaps the best example of this. The Queen not only interacts within the game and with its players, but she also interacts with the framework and structure by which the game is played. We find the player has an important role in authoring the game, which is, of course, dependent on how authoritative s/he is.

As I've reflected, I've seen that it's this sense of “design” I wanted to capture in my original paper on Alice. My wrestling with this sense was itself both the consequence and the action required of this course that included Alice. There were always frameworks that could be found on the syllabus: the holistic frameworks for the class and unit; as well as the daily framework, which shifted (as in any class) and extended forwards as the syllabus version number was slowly incremented. Nor were the given frameworks themselves static. Often the point of a class period was the wrestling with the framework. It was an interaction among ourselves and the frameworks. This happens trivially in any class, but in this class it became explicit, as the topics of structure, authority, and author-ity were explored.

IV. Conclusion

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland does not conclude with Alice's experience but with her sister's interpretation of that experience (156), and so I take Carroll as my cue. As Callista and Alex suggest, when students focus on their disciplinary interests in an analysis of literature, they develop their reading skills across fields. Crossing between fields, they offer new and original insights into literary texts. Literature can do all any reformer could desire an educator to do; it is there for our use, and it does not complain about how we treat it. But reformers and teachers need to think beyond automatic categories, call it STEM or call it Innovation, that is, beyond superficial “fixes”—if every student majored in technology, science, and business, America's problems would still not be solved, nor its role as a leader in the world guaranteed.7 Communication, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving can happen anywhere, even in Wonderland. Indeed, Wonderland is probably the best of labs because engaging those skills enables students to emerge relatively unscathed from its unexpected challenges while preparing them to meet the less forgiving real ones.

Alex was literally Alice in Wonderland in Callista's film. But all the students were Alice in University Wonderland. Like Alice, as Callista and Alex suggest, they got frustrated, but rose to the challenge of looking at Alice through the lens of their academic interests. Their adventures are, of course, just beginning, and will lead, I feel sure, to further growth in all their endeavors, whatever they might be.

Notes

1 See Jada F. Smith, “At a Historically Black University, Filling in Wikipedia's Gap in Color,” for a recent argument regarding the resource and the recognition that “'If it can become a point of departure, then it can become useful.”

2 With the organizing of a task force on creativity, Penn State Berks recently recognized the importance of integrating creativity into curricula. Ken Kay, “Foreword,” observes how rarely these essential skills are “deliberately” part of any curriculum and are gained haphazardly (17).

3 Anna Herbert, The Pedagogy of Creativity, 133, sees creativity as “inherent,” emphasizing that “It is more a question as to ‘what kind' of creativity we wish to elicit.”

4 See, for example, Robin J. Wilson. Lewis Carroll in Numberland: his Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life an Agony in Eight Fits; and, more popularly, Bernard M. Patten, The Logic of Alice.

5 Anne Clark, The Real Alice, 89-104, discusses the conscious decisions Dodgson made when he revised the work for publication, noting the earlier version would be “unsuitable for a wider audience” (94).

6 Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, ed. Richard Kelly, 51. All quotations are from this edition, unless otherwise noted.

7 Loretta Jackson-Hayes, “We Don't Need More STEM majors. We Need More STEM Majors with Liberal Arts Training,” a chemist, remarking that business and government “question the value of such an education,” claims that “employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world.”

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