engleski

Alice’s outing to beyond the canon: The Nursery Alice

This presentation focuses on the narrative strategies used by Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel in their adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll 1865), titled The Nursery Alice (1889), and on a comparison of these strategies with those used in the original novel. The purpose of the analysis is to establish whether the narrative features of this adaptation justify its categorisation as a picturebook in semiotic terms. The Nursery Alice has often been criticised as a less valuable version of the original story, and usually expelled from the canon of children’s literature. It has also been dismissed as unimportant and often avoided in historical overviews. A possible reason for this may be the consideration of The Nursery Alice as an intralingual translation of the original. According to Roman Jakobson (1961), intralingual translation, or rewording, is a translation of a text into other words of the same language ; interlinguistic translation, or translation proper, is a translation into another language ; and intersemiotic translation, or transmutation, is a translation into another sign system. This study aims to show that The Nursery Alice is an intersemiotic translation, i.e., a translation from literature (and language as its medium) into another medium, the format of a picturebook, which uses visual and verbal codes in a specific manner. Both narratives share the same story, but their discourses differ. The picturebook is an art form different from literature. For instance, one of the basic differences is that a novel is printed in a book, while a picturebook is a book, a three-dimensional object. Further, in picturebooks the story is told by means of two separate discourses, verbal and visual. The dialogue between the visual and the verbal discourses of The Nursery Alice is emphasised in the narrative itself, which strengthens the argument for its categorisation as a picturebook. The picturebook, however, does not sever the connection with the source text ; on the contrary, it clarifies some aspects of the story they share. The adaptation offers several clues to understand the meanings which are subtly interwoven in the novel and which remain difficult to detect without reference to the picturebook. To sum up, as a picturebook, the adaptation performs functions in the narrative communication different from those in the source text of the novel, and also serves different purposes. It is therefore argued that The Nursery Alice should be re-evaluated in this new context, using different criteria from those employed for the novel.

The Nursery Alice ; picturebook ; narrative ; adaptation ; intersemiotic translation

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