There’s a new book that analyses Lewis Carroll’s works: “Design Theory, Language and Architectural Space in Lewis Carroll” by Caroline Dionne.
In both “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there”, we can find spacial challenges, like the strange rabbit hole, the chessboard-like landscape, and how Alice gets stuck when she grows. Here, Carroll plays with different understandings of space: space as a set of physical or material boundaries, or as an abstract geometry.
With this book, Dionne tries to show us how Carroll’s texts are tools to think philosophically about our relationship to the spaces (both social and architectural) we inhabit and share. She highlights connections between Carroll’s writings and the contemporary sociopolitical debates that impacted his life as a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, and tries to connect his works with theories that assume space to be a social, collective phenomenon. She analyses the relationship between words and spaces and highlights the role of language in processes of place making. According to Dionne, her central argument is that we build space collectively with words.
Her analyses is based on Carroll’s two ‘Alice’ books, but also on some of his other works, like his writings about logic and geometry, including two short pamphlets on architecture.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in design theory, design history, architecture, and literary theory and criticism.
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