Schema Disruption and Identity in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in the Wonderland

Abstract

This paper focuses on the importance of schema and context in the interpretation of literary texts and its impact on reader and character identity. The understanding of literary texts is aided and enhanced when a reader is able to create a text world in their mind. A reader’s comprehension of a text is partly dependent on their background knowledge, which forms their already existing schema. The reader’s existing schema may be supported, challenged, or disrupted in a literary text, which may lead to the creation of new schema and a new reader identity. The newly created schema that might be similar to or different from the reader’s existing schema makes a text world for them, helping them in textual comprehension and an analysis of their self. This paper examines the first three chapters from Alice’s Adventures in the Wonderland by Lewis Carroll in the light of these notions. Carroll has been able to create a non-sense text world by manipulating the semantic complexity of language, and leads the main character to self-search. The paper draws on Elena Semino’s Schema Theory (1995) for the analysis.