Alice in wonderland and what the surrealism found there

• Grant number: 15/11983-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2015
• End date: July 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Suzi Frankl Sperber
• Grantee: Thaís Meirelles Parelli
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking-glass presents us with a work full of mazes, puzzles, and parodies that form itself through word games and logic "disorganized", the logic inside out, inversion. The narrative is structured at a morphological level on paradoxes and portmanteau words, painted by fun and colorful language, unusual character characteristic of nonsense. The saga of Alice inspired a series of fantastic/wonderful illustrations. Many artists at different times, including Carroll himself, illustrated the girl book, with John Tenniel as the first prominent artist, considered the official illustrator who marked the visual imagery associated with Alice. In this study, we intend to draw correlations between the visual world of Alice (both what has been illustrated as too what the nonsense narrative offers us) and the surrealist aesthetics. In mid-1924 we have witnessed a new aesthetic in art history: surrealism. Considered one of the most radical of the twentieth-century avant-garde movements, Surrealism created a new way of making art by refusing the "common sense" and the incessant search for the actual operation of the reality that was believed to be able to discover in the depths of unconscious. We will analyze, so, the influences of Carroll's work in this avant-garde movement and how some of the fundamentals of surrealism are presented in Alice since both are allies the unusual and playful with the childhood theme, the wonderful daily life, the femme-infant, and the confusion between dream and reality. Thus, starting from the seemingly naive perception of Alice in this universe, we will have as study material, the illustrations of John Tenniel and Salvador Dalí, and the works of René Magritte playing with the paradox between language and image.