See you at SAMLA!

Posted by kristenfiggins on

Next week I will be presenting at the South Atlantic MLA conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Even though it’s a small conference, there’s always a huge turn-out of big names in the field of Adaptation Studies, so I’m looking forward to putting a face to the many names I’ve studied over the last few years.

I’ll be live-tweeting some panels, so please follow me on Twitter, @KristenFiggins if you’d like to keep up with what’s happening at SAMLA.

“They’d Eaten Every One”: Predation, Consumption, and Consent in Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and Adaptations

My presentation focuses on depictions of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice texts, specifically the video game Alice: Madness Returns (2011) and Christine Henry’s novel, Alice (2015). Both cast the talking oysters as victims of systems of abuse and violence. I argue that the push in adaptations of Carroll’s texts to anthropomorphize the oysters specifically as abused women and children show the deeply consistent connections between consumption and predation.

From left to right: Tenniel’s illustration of the oysters in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), Disney’s interpretation of “Mother Oyster” in their Alice in Wonderland (1951), and American McGee’s interpretation of the oysters in the video game, Alice: Madness Returns (2011).

UPDATE: SAMLA was great!

Left: My presentation went well with a terrifying opening (because “The Walrus and the Carpenter” really is quite ominous).
Right: A photo of three University of Arkansas’s adaptation studies scholars. L to R: Kristen Figgins, Lissette Lopez Szwydky, and Sharon Fox

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