Getting Ready for Alice Week

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is our song and dance this week and we want everyone to come join in the festivities. Everyone has a great opportunity to become more versed in the world of Alice through the fun events (or maybe tricks) planned around campus this week.

First, be sure to check out Dr. Michael Heyman who is visiting the SDSU campus and giving a talk on March 4. He is considered an expert on aspects of Lewis Carroll’s work and is also an expert of nonsense. He is the head editor of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense and the Faculty advisor for the Debate and Slam Poetry clubs. Dr. Heyman has been published in The Horn Book, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, The Lion and the Unicorn, The Five Owls, and Children's Literature and the Fin de Siecle. His latest book This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse (2012) is filled with some great nonsense poems, stories, chants, and songs. But moving past the nonsense, this event is one definitely worth attending because it will be jabbertastic.

But, that is not all. This Friday, March 6th, the Experimental Theatre is making room for a pre-show talk panel from the Children’s Literature Department. Doors open at 5:30pm and the panel will begin at 6pm. It will be led by the Director of the National Center for the Study of Children's Literature at SDSU, Dr. Joseph Thomas, and it will also feature Dr. Michael Heyman from Berklee College, Dr. Shelley Orr from SDSU’s School of Theatre, and several graduate students from the English department including yours truly, Cristina and Meg. This panel is intended to stir up some fun trouble in honor of the theater’s next great play: an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. ALICE: Curiouser and Curiouser! starts March 6th and goes through March 15th at the Don Powell Theatre.

If there was ever a time to familiarize yourself in the curious world of Wonderland, this is definitely it! However, we cannot guarantee that you won't be tumbled, rumbled, squmbled, and lampeled just a bit.

Looking forward to see all you Alice fans there.

Michael Heyman is Visiting SDSU... Come Join the Adventure!!

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 Departmentof 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!

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.”

Sounds neat! 

The lecture is open to the public and we encourage students, community members, and faculty to join us!