Ambivalent texts, the borderline, and the sense of nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”

Abstract

Taking Carroll‘s ―Jabberwocky as emblematic of a text historically enjoyed by both children and adults, this article seeks to place the text in what Kristeva defines as the borderline between language and subjectivity to theorize a realm in which ambivalent texts emerge as such. The fact that children‘s literature remains largely trapped in the literary–didactic split in which these texts are understood as either learning materials and primers for literacy, or as examples of poetic or historical modernist discourse. This article situates Carroll‘s text in the theories of language, subjectivity, and clinical discourse toward a more complex reading of a children‘s poem, one that finds a point of intersection between the adult and the child reader.