Just in case you’ve been living down a rabbit hole yourself, these two classic stories are about a young girl named Alice who experiences all kinds of surreal encounters in a fantasy world. In Looking-Glass, she enters another world through her mirror, while in Wonderland, she dreams that she has discovered this strange kingdom after having followed a white rabbit (who’s dressed in a waistcoat and is worrying about being late for an important event—yep, we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore).
In both cases, Alice finds herself in a land in which weird and wacky imagery abounds, identity is always shifting, and language often fails as a means of communication. Fertile ground for semiotic analysis, indeed.
Within these fantasy worlds, words are often shown to have multiple meanings—that’s one of the reasons why there’s so much confusion. How might we relate this to the concepts of encoding/decoding and the closed/open text?
What sort of relationship exists between language (langue) and speech (parole) in the Alice books? Is there some sort of imbalance or disconnection that contributes to all the misunderstanding?