Lecture on ALICE's Nonsense on March 4 by Michael Heyman

This post was borrowed from the following: http://sdsuchildlit.blogspot.com/2015/02/michael-heyman-is-visiting-sdsu-come.html

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)

Love Library, SDSU

Leon Williams room (LL 430-431)

The National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, with support from the Instructionally Related Activities fund, the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and the SDSU Library, is happy to announce a lecture by Professor Michael Heyman, noted poet, scholar, and musician. Michael's lecture concerns Lewis Carroll’s Alice and his Alice books—the first of which, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is celebrating its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary this year!

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, Heyman 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 itis. 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!