Alice: Research Reports Page

Link: Alice Adaptation Project

Research Reports by Team Members

• Research Report by Salman Bakht
• Research Report by Robin Chin
• Research Report by Sarah Harris
• Research Report by Rama Hoetzlein

Research Report Abstracts

Salman Bakht, "Alice's Adventures in Intermedia Collage: Montage Theory in Zetti's Sight Sound Motion Applied to Adaptation, Collage, and Nonsense"

Sight Sound Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics by Herbert Zettl describes montage techniques used in film editing. This paper relates these techniques and devices of literary nonsense used in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Further, this paper describes how montage techniques could be extended for use in creating a multimedia collage adaptation of Alice's story.

Robin Chin, "Annotating Carroll's Alice: Martin Gardner's 1960 The Annotated Alice"

Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice combines Lewis Carroll’s two most famous works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), and adds to them numerous annotations with information about Carroll’s life, as well as about both books’ publication histories. Gardner includes these annotations ostensibly in order to help modern readers better understand the original experience of reading Carroll’s works. However, by allowing such contextual knowledge to infiltrate and overwhelm the margins of the edited text, one may argue that Gardner seeks surreptitiously to reinforce the more iconic and “puzzling” experience of reading Alice, and of the textual medium.

Sarah Harris, "Alice in Wonderlands: Jan Svankmajer's 'Alice' (1988)"

This report begins with a brief synopsis of Jan Svankmajer’s film “Alice” (1988, Czechoslovakia). A particular focus is placed on Svankmajer’s formal strategies in adapting the original text, written by Lewis Carroll in 1865, to an animated film form. Harris situates the film within the corpus of Svankmajer's stop-animation and clay-mation works, highlighting some of the characteristics of his renown auteur-style. Furthermore, she elaborates on a few specific adaptation techniques, including the “match-on-action” and use of direct address, as potential starting points for further analysis. Theoretical questions emerge pertaining to the losses and gains in adaptating texts across different media as well as the impacts of digital and filmic visualizations on the reader’s imagination.

Rama Hoetzlein, "Dark Alice and the Technology of Gaming: American McGee's 'Alice' Video Game"

American McGee's Alice is a third-person video game on the theme of Alice in Wonderland with a unique twist. Shortly after its release (Oct 2000) , it received both praise and criticism for its dark interpretation of Carroll's classic text. The game introduces a gothic element, with Alice as a vengeful teen who lost both parents in a fire. Chapter seven of Will Brooker's book "Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture" examines the theme of McGee's Alice, with detailed descriptions of the opening video sequence, the box art, and the image of Alice portrayed in the game. Brooker's goal is to understand the mood of this adaptation and the intention of its creator. He engages in a close reading of the particular feelings conveyed by the game. Yet another way to examine McGee's Alice, however, is as a technical product of video game design. Brooker examines the medium of the game to some extent, for example when describing the user control of Alice as a kind of "tourism", but does so always in term of understanding the mood of the game. This is a natural interpretation, as the theme itself is equally captivating as it is disturbing. However, we may also ask what affordances are offered to Alice through the media of the video game, and what is lost? What rules of game making are broken, and which are upheld? As McGee's Alice is far removed from Carroll's original, we may be able to evaluate the game more easily on these terms.