{"id":212,"date":"2008-04-30T10:05:25","date_gmt":"2008-04-30T15:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/04\/30\/slaying-the-jabberwocky-of-textual-difficulty\/"},"modified":"2008-04-30T10:06:36","modified_gmt":"2008-04-30T15:06:36","slug":"slaying-the-jabberwocky-of-textual-difficulty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/04\/30\/slaying-the-jabberwocky-of-textual-difficulty\/","title":{"rendered":"Slaying the Jabberwocky of Textual Difficulty"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Throughout the semester, I have been interested in the pedagogy of difficult texts.\u00a0 One of the reasons I chose \u201cJabberwocky\u201d for my final textual analysis paper and lesson plan was because of its assumed nonsensical meaning.\u00a0 I had read the poem as a child in <em>Alice in Wonderland<\/em> and had analyzed it with a group of fourth graders when I worked as a reading assistant.\u00a0 The fourth graders and I translated the first stanza into sensible English via Carroll\u2019s coinages.\u00a0 The students enjoyed the exercise and found Carroll\u2019s language play amusing, but they were probably beyond confused with Carroll\u2019s ability to twist word meaning into a translatable text.\u00a0 Could they have constructed similar gibberish on their own?\u00a0 Surely.\u00a0 Could they have interpreted Carroll\u2019s meaning without the definitions he provided?\u00a0 Probably not, and this fact supports why Carroll\u2019s writing never requires interpretation.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"Times New Roman\">The allure of \u201cJabberwocky\u201d comes from its ability to seem nonsensical while standing up to syntactical analysis at the same time.\u00a0 Young readers love Carroll because he does not explain away the magic of his writing; literary critics love Carroll because he shows meaning through his textual riddles.\u00a0 Only through Carroll\u2019s additional characters and informational texts will the reader gain access to the meaning behind his language play.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"Times New Roman\">Carroll provides a literal translation of Jabberwocky in a letter to the Girls\u2019 Latin School in Boston: \u201c \u2018the Anglo-Saxon word \u2018wocer\u2019 or \u2018wocor\u2019 signifies \u2018offspring\u2019 or \u2018fruit.\u2019\u00a0 Taking \u2018jabber\u2019 in its ordinary acceptation of \u2018excited and voluble discussion,\u2019 this would give the meaning of \u2018the result of much excited discussion\u2019\u201d (<em>The Annotated Alice <\/em>195).\u00a0 Carroll\u2019s mystical creature exists to promote \u201cexcited discussion.\u201d Any reader or critic of Carroll\u2019s writing must agree that his \u201cnonsensical\u201d poetry does exactly that.\u00a0 <\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Throughout the semester, I have been interested in the pedagogy of difficult texts.\u00a0 One of the reasons I chose \u201cJabberwocky\u201d for my final textual analysis paper and lesson plan was because of its assumed nonsensical meaning.\u00a0 I had read the poem as a child in Alice in Wonderland and had analyzed it with a group [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}