Michael Heyman
Public Lecture
Alice in Wonderland
One Hundred Fifty Years Later: A New Magic Lantern Phantasmämphigory
March 4, 2015
5:00PM- 5:50 (followed by questions and discussion until
6:30PM)
Michael Heyman travels to sunny San Diego all the way from Boston, where he is a professor at Berklee College of Music. At Berklee, Michael teaches courses on Children’s Literature, Poetry, Arthropodiatry, and Nonsensical Nunchaku. When not teaching, he writes poetry, plays saxophone, and carries out scholarly investigations in various areas of esoterica—including the parararational, pataphysical, and nonsensical).
Professor Heyman is a world-renowned scholar and writer of literary nonsense and children’s literature. He has edited The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (2007), and his poems and stories for children can be found in The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories (2005), The Moustache Maharishi and other unlikely stories (2007), and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems andWorse (2012), which he also edited.
Of his talk, the good doctor writes: “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland lives one hundred fifty years after its publication not because Alice is a princess in a literary fairy tale, not because of our own flirtation with Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, and not because Alice has become embedded in our culture as innocent, vixen, or queen of psychedelia; rather, Alice in Wonderland lives because of its uneasy balance of all of these things and more. Its genius lies in what it does more than what it is. And what it does is nonsense. This talk, part magic lantern show and part paean to Lewis Carroll’s nonsense literature, does the unthinkable: it separates analysis from interpretation, it values the cart over the load. It offers the greatness of Alice as a teasing and tempting nonsense process, in its ability, like Humpty Dumpty, always to leave egg on our faces.”
The lecture is open to the public and we encourage students, community members, and faculty to join us!
Posts
