Metalanguage in Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and Biggs’s reRead

Abstract

In her article "Metalanguage in Carroll's 'Jabberwocky' and Biggs's reRead" Asunci????-Varela discusses Simon Biggs's installation reRead in relation to Lewis Carroll's poem. L??-Varela posits that both works draw attention to the functioning of self-reflexive semiotic mechanisms present in human discourse and gestures. Based on the examples of the poem and the installation, L??-Varela discusses how the human mind creates narratological coherence out of random and recursive patterns and argues that it does so by including other media which enable formats beyond the textual and the iconic. Further, L??-Varela discusses how we are pre-disposed to process any semiotic exchange in terms of spatiotemporal sequences and interpret signs with the help of prior knowledge gathered from intersubjective experiences.