Half-dreaming phantomwise : exploring visual (re)presentations of the Quixotic ‘melancholy farewell’ moment in ‘Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There’

Abstract

Via practical application, this research explores the possibility of adapting Lewis Carroll’s “melancholy farewell” moment in a multimedia fine art context. It is a search for possibilities in extracting an arts-based methodology from the metaphoric-metonymic trope of metamorphosis applied within the specific text to create a series of contemporary visual artworks. In this episode, from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), the legacy of Don Quixote not only appears signicant in its destabilizing, satirical narrative style but emphasized in the heroic personification of the White Knight whose perpetual farewell haunts multiple dimensions. The purpose of this thesis is to create visual representations of these Quixotic dimensions by enquiring into seemingly disparate discourses such as error, nuclear calamity, virtual reality, and interspecific hybridity. This dissertation is concerned with making and, also, with considerations of artistic precedents and sources, the drawing of analogies with other disciplines and media. It engages, analyzes, and discusses various aspects of flux, transformations, and transcendence in this Alice fragment influenced by a framework of theoretically informed readings. It investigates the implications and consequences of such questioning and the way in which identity is constructed through vision and perception on structuring concepts such as humanity (as opposed to non-human sentient beings), language, faith, time, space, the precariousness of childhood, and the rules of logic. A Quixotic endeavour per se, the path of this cross-media exploration weaves a thread from engagements with these related themes in contemporary literature and art, back to the first known visual representations found in cave art.