My Recent Thoughts

 Today during our class I was confronted with many issues pertaining to how I think of what classifies "reading." Very similar to what others seemed to express, I think that audiotapes of books provide some sort of literary experience; however I think much of what is gained during reading is lost when we simply listen to the words. For me, it is a very personal thing: as I read, actually seeing the words float by on the page forces me to acknowledge them. However, on a less personal note I think what is most lost when listening to texts is one's ability to have creative authorship. When I read I imagine my own characters (of course based off of the text), I have my own version of how the characters voices sound, and how their words interact with one another. While listening though, especially if the accents and voices are provided in the audiotape, it takes away this creativity (our own right to have "creative juices" flowing) that I think makes reading so worthwhile.

On a more Alice-y note, I was very intrigued by our conversation of how Alice in Wonderland confronts us with its problematic narrative prose like structure. While reading the text I felt very judgmental of the other characters, almost as if I had adopted Alice's persona--and rarely did I stop and think oh wait, who the heck is narrating this whole thing? I suppose that the narrator serves as a person meant to be very similar to us (an outsider looking in), maybe the narrator serves as Carroll's way to add some sense into a nonsensical story?

Furthermore, I also felt compelled to further explore what I thought of the poems in the story. Unlike others in the class, I rather enjoyed the poems. I sort of felt they were breaks from the obscurity of the normal sentences (I know this is odd, considering the poems seemed more abstract than anything else, but oh well). And, after thinking I was almost comforted by their presence, Anne's statement that maybe the poems are a purer look at the unconscious made me question my real reasons for liking them. 

While reading Alice in Wonderland I was frustrated, intrigued, and challenged. I thought this was a challenging read because as young adults, it is undeniably hard to revert back to the child like ability to believe anything. To a child, I am rather sure that Carroll's fantastical wonderland is surely possible; even impossibility serves as a possibility (as spoken by one of the characters "Sometimes I dream of 6 impossible things before breakfast"). Yet, to us, as students who have been drilled into questioning everything, accepting Wonderland and all of its wonder was unbelievably hard. Overall, Alice in Wonderland has provided us with a great text to discuss what genre is, and I think it's safe to say that we have yet to come upon one genre that classifies it. This book, to me, seems a culmination of fantastical ideas mixed with narration mixed with quest, either way you look at it Alice in Wonderland is a literary anomaly.