Dr. Hensley’s lecture was a fascinating addition to our growing understanding of the presence of the past, as it brought up the relevant and ever-increasing modern issue of climate change and environmental decay, and matched it with two-hundred-year-old literature. That pairing initially seemed to be a little bit of a reach to me, but the lecture quickly proved how unfounded that concern really was. As we near the apparent end of this industrial-focused period, it really does make a lot of sense to go back and look at the beginning of it. And, as Dr. Hensley suggested, where better to look for the common views and social or cultural environment surrounding the literal environment than in the literature of the time? Dr. Hensley’s lecture on his work reminded the audience, including myself, that literature is never written in a vacuum, and is formed within the context of contemporary issues.
Much of Dr. Hensley’s lecture focused on his case study of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He suggested that since Lewis Carroll wrote this piece during a transition from a rural and agricultural world to an age focused on the urban and industrial, such a transition can be found paralleled within Alice’s travels. Alice’s “regular England” and “Wonderland” can be thought of as two mutually exclusive realms of regularity, and Alice as in a state of transition like contemporary England.
One student asked how this awareness of a transition could be translated into decisive action towards recuperation. I think this can be tied back to something Dr. Hensley said about Alice’s actions. As she tried to navigate Wonderland, Alice’s mistake was that she tried to apply the rules from her own world in the realm of the second world. This is fascinatingly similar to the outcries made about the outdated models of Hurricane Harvey statistical predictions Dr. Hensley mentioned. That is to say, we are entering a new realm, as different from our familiar one as Wonderland was strange to Alice. And yet, we still act as if it’s the same world our grandparents grew up in, and we pretend we can approach hurricanes and natural conservation in the same traditional manner. Just as Alice grew to understand the non-sense of standing still in order to get home, so Dr. Hensley proposed that we as a global collective need to adjust to this new predicament we find ourselves in.
Dr. Hensley’s argument was contingent on the idea that we are currently in a state of transition similar to the one at the beginning of the industrial age, and that we can see evidence of the fears of transition in contemporary minds like Lewis Carroll. This prompted me to look at my experience of literature in the modern day, to look for similarities to Carroll’s work. What I found, more than a fear of transition, is an overarching fear of an “end.” Consumptive entertainment such as Mad Max, The Walking Dead, The Maze Runner, or even children’s shows like Adventure Time, all focus on a world after catastrophe. I would posit that the difference between 19th Century literature and today’s, is as follows: in the 19th Century, there was a fear concerning the loss of the past; now, there is a fear about the loss of the future.