|
Back to Blog
This talk will offer a reading of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, attending to the text’s preoccupation with both consumption and the living, and to the multiple animal encounters that trouble our assumptions about what it means to eat and what is meant for eating. Living things in Wonderland—Alice included—are sometimes ‘who’, sometimes ‘it’. They are also sometimes food (potential or otherwise), and sometimes friends. Most (but not all) have the power of speech. Some are fabulous and chimaerical, others seem ‘normal’—if such a word can retain its sense in Wonderland. Some have human faces, yet are less than humane (the Duchess and her cook, for example), while some nonhuman animals seem to fulfil criteria we often reserve for the human (talking, walking on two legs, wearing clothes, delivering letters, having tea parties, etc.). The effect of all of this is a deconstruction of any rigorous distinction between human beings and other animals, and by reading Alice’s socio-gustatory encounters, I will explore why exactly, as the Red Queen tells Alice, ‘it isn’t etiquette to cut any one you’ve been introduced to’. Jemma Deer(Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich; Harvard University Center for the Environment) Comments are closed.
|