Humpty Dumpty

[Terrance]

Those P-lister yet unfamiliar with the text or world  of lit-crit and
crit-theory might be feeling a bit like Alice passing through the
looking glass. Once through it, how can language reflect reality? But
the mirror is still there. It's Plato's mirror and it's turning away
from nature, away from Hamlet, away from Joyce's crack squatting over a
hole wiped with a journalist's jargon and in a postmodernist's hand the
mirror is held up to reading itself. 

Wabe

Take a look at the word "Wabe", a word hitherto without meaning in the
text, generates a surpassingly vivid image which simultaneously expands
its physical size and solidity of interpretation as as to intrude into
Alice's and the reader's perception of reality. A word has produced a
concept rather than the other way about. 

Something metaphorical about Alice. The language constructs our world,
rather than reflecting it. 

Lit-crit and Crit-theory have nothing on Alice. For so much of what they
do and do poorly, mostly because they can't, as Molly Bloom implores,
"Tell [us] in plain words" is translated from the French misreadings of
Greek philosophy. French and those that pretend to translate it's
critical ideas to English are both too self-centered and self-absorbed
to force Anglos to become self-consciously aware that meaning is not
passive and universal but produced through the language and
contextualization of literary texts.  We should do well to remember that
Alice was English and that 
Americans are far too narcissistic to step through a looking glass and
far too practical to fall in French Rabbit hole. 


http://sundials.org/about/humpty.htm