TMA03 Creative Reworking and Reflective Commentary Assignment

1. Introduction

The art of adapting literature with rich themes and impactful language for children is also imaginative storytelling that can be adapted for various audiences. This assignment involves reworking an old text into a new format, keeping the key essence yet accessible to a new set of readers.

The book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll has been chosen for this assignment. This novel was adapted as an innocent children's tale, but it is a whimsical essay full of nonsensical humour and surreal adventure. It will rework an extract from the book into a modern telling relevant to teenagers (ages 13–17) (Carroll, 1865). This transformation will show Alice’s journey in a contemporary sense of a school to make it readable to older readers and maintain the theme and emotion of Alice’s self-discovery and curiosity. This creative reworking will be followed by a commentary reflective of the adaptation process, engaged with relevant Block 3 materials detailing the process of adapting a 19th-century children’s story to a teenage audience.

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2. Creative Reworking

Title: Alice in High School

• The echoes bounced through the crowd-filled school hallway as Alice slammed her locker shut. He texted, "Meet me in the library." Urgent. The Queen is furious." She was always cryptic and dramatic, from Cat, her best friend.
• She dodged a group of cheerleaders and, with a sigh, made her way to the back of the school, to the library that, by some miracle, would start up at 3:30 and allow her to read until 6:30. She pulled the heavy wooden doors open, and there was Cat, sprawled across a beanbag chair, his smiling face well-known face.
• He whipped a chess piece between his fingers and purred, 'You’re late.'
• Alice rolled her eyes. "Cut the theatrics. What’s the emergency?"
• Cat leaned forward. "We tell the Queen you should be out of the debate club." She says you’re ‘too unpredictable.’"
• Alice’s stomach twisted. She had come so far to receive that spot but was now being discarded just for asking questions. "That’s ridiculous!" she protested.
• Cat smirked. "Everything here is ridiculous. However, if you wish to fight it, you must fight the Queen herself. What that means is."
• Alice swallowed hard. She did know. The Queen of Hearts was the school’s most feared senior, head of student council, debate club president, and overlord of every social clique (Carroll, 1865).
• Alice took a deep breath. "Fine. Let’s play her game."

3. Reflective Commentary

3.1 Rationale for Reworking

The book's themes that remained constant over generations were identity, authority, and self-discovery. It was decided that they needed to be reworked into a modern high school setting for teenagers. The fantastical world depicted in Lewis Carroll’s original work, published in 1865, where Alice encounters strange things and absurd logic, is meant to be viewed as the challenges of growing up. The adaptation of this story within a contemporary school environment makes these themes relevant to teenagers (ages 13-17) through reimagining this story.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was initially aimed at an audience of children aged eight to twelve, whose imaginative minds were most engaged by this creative world, these whimsical characters and this playful language. Yet, teenagers look for narratives of their struggle in real life against peer pressure, power dynamics and personal development (Pincock and Jones, 2020). By versioning Wonderland’s authority measures as school hierarchical functions, the Queen of Hearts becomes a dominant senior student who ensures social status and tasks of extras, etc. Modern retelling accomplishes this. This adaptation also reinforces the novel’s parable qualities by demonstrating how authority is immanent in many forms across a historical and current time frame.

Another consideration for such modernity was making the text more easily read. Carroll’s original text is full of wordplay and Victorian cultural references, but it is pretty hard for contemporary teenagers to sink into the linguistic style. This adaptation of the story preserves the essential underlying journey of Alice’s adventure of testing for rules and finding herself, but it conforms more to modern readers by rendering it more interesting.

Furthermore, the adaptation provides a tighter narrative structure with clear stakes and character motivations (Green, 2021). Alice’s traversal is episodic in the original, alternating between one strange thing and the next without a straightforward plot. However, the reworking is presented in a more linear way Alice happens to confront a direct challenge (being removed from the debate club) and an antagonist (Queen of Hearts, who’s now a senior student), which forms a sense of conflict and resolution conforming with the principles of contemporary storytelling.

Through the modernisation of the story, Alice’s struggles can be worked into the young readers’ own experiences to continue to instil that the challenge of drifting authority, identity, and ultimately personal growth continues to be a constant (Carroll, 1865).

3.2 Theoretical Framework

Children’s Literature and Adaptation Theory

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is generally known as a nonsense novel laden with Victorian literary tradition, wordplay, and surrealist themes. Adaptation theory argues that classic literature should be relived by reworking cultural and linguistic frameworks to make the discourse relevant (Leitch, 2018). This adaptation adheres to the principle of keeping Alice’s themes of curiosity and self-discovery while modernising the setting and other aspects.

In presenting Alice through a series of encounters in Carroll's story episode, there is little cause and effect. The non-linear narrative reflects childhood imagination. Still, it is a favourite of teenage readers who prefer a narrative with a greater sense of conflict and conclusion (Webber et al., 2023). Reworking uses structuralist principles to make sure Alice has a clear antagonist (school bully as the Queen of Hearts), defined conflict (being taken out of the debate club) and a goal (protesting authority).

Reader-Response Theory and Audience Engagement

According to Reader-Response Theory (Rosenblatt, 1978), the reader brings personal experiences and context to create meaning for a text (Long, 2024). While younger children enjoy Alice’s whimsical world as pure fantasy, teenagers might relate more poignantly to the psycho-social aspects of the story. Placing the story in a high school allows the readers to understand the real-life power struggles, which helps readers relate Alice's experiences to those of their own lives (Long, 2024). As teenage readers tend to enjoy those kinds of stories, the understanding to use first-person narration is the added cherry on the cake.

Language Adaptation and Accessibility

Although it is not archaic in its language, being playfully poetic, Carroll’s language includes vocabulary from older times and complex sentence structures that contemporary readers may find challenging. Using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) framework, texts should be tailored to the target audience's linguistic proficiency and cognitive engagement (Cheng, 2023). Simplified Alice’s dialogue, naturalistic speech patterns and modern teenage expressions were used to simplify the contemporary adaptation and make it readable.

For example, in the original novel, Alice responds to absurd situations with polite curiosity:

•  “I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?”
• In the modern adaptation, Alice expresses frustration and confusion in a way that resonates with teenage readers:
• “Seriously? This school is a madhouse. One minute, I’m on the debate team, and the next, I’m being exiled like I committed a crime.”

3.3 Challenges and Adaptation Strategies

Challenge 1: Keeping the Core Themes whilst Modernizing the Setting

The most critical challenge was to remain faithful to the essence of Alice’s journey despite the contemporary one. The original novel explores universal themes of identity, curiosity, and questioning authority (Mueller and Salonia, 2022). While these themes were delivered in an abstract, nonsensical world, they were difficult to translate directly into a modern context.

Adaptation Strategy:

As in Wonderland, social hierarchies, rules, and power dynamics are paramount. The Wonderland setting was reimagined as a high school: the space where everything unravels. Regarding its social relevance, the Queen of Hearts, an irrational and authoritarian ruler, was transformed into a school bully and debate club president, a ruler with a controlling nature that remained relevant. Alice’s road to knowing herself and defying authority was retained in the narrative.

Challenge 2: Translating Carroll’s Linguistic Style for a teenage audience.

Victorian-era language, puns, and wordplay in Lewis Carroll’s original text may make it difficult for contemporary teenage readers to enjoy the text fully. Firstly, the formal and inquisitive tone of the original Alice differs from modern teenage dialogue and expression (Carroll, 1865).

Adaptation Strategy:

Her dialogue was rewritten to sound more casual and conversational to make Alice’s voice more relatable. For a second example, the adaptation uses actual teenage language against Alice’s polite and structured speech from the original.

• Original text: “Curiouser and curiouser!” Alice began to cry (so surprised that she would entirely forget when speaking good English).
• Adapted: “This freak school is getting weirder by the second.” I’m also on the debate team, and I’m banished first. Makes total sense.”
• These changes help modern readers experience Alice’s emotions and experience authentically.

Challenge 3: Converting an episodic structure to a linear one.

Carroll's Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does not follow a standard cause-and-effect narrative. Instead of having goals and resolutions, Alice wanders from one peculiar event to the next. While this structure will work well with younger readers who love imaginative storytelling, it works less for teenagers who prefer a story with conflict, stakes, and progression.

Adaptation Strategy:

With a more engaging and structured plot, the adaptation established an apparent conflict (Mueller and Salonia, 2022). It used the Lady of the Kettle Hat as a conflict between Alice being unfairly removed from the debate club by the Queen of Hearts the (school’s most senior and influential individuals). As a result, this allowed for creating a goal-driven storyline where Alice has to decide whether to go against the Queen’s authority and so we have a storyline that is finally resolved and directed by what the teenagers want to hear.

Challenge 4: Fidelity vs Creativity

Literary adaptation is a key challenge, as the reworking has to be recognisable as original. Simply modernising the setting without new thematic connections will result in losing the essence of the original story.

Adaptation Strategy:

• The adaptation slightly wove certain iconic elements from the original text into it.
• Alice’s mysterious but insightful school friend, Cat, helps Alice navigate the school’s social politics and into the school (Carroll, 1865).
• Alice challenged the school’s authority in the “Drink Me” metaphorical sense.
• Controlling who stays or leaves school clubs was a figurative expression of power based on the Queen’s famous line, "Off with their heads!"
• Preserving the novel's whimsy and making it relevant, the adaptation intelligently manages to keep the aforementioned recognisable items while introducing the book to a contemporary setting.

3.4 Evaluation and Reflection

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland reworked into a story set at a high school, was a success: it modernised this story with staying power, wit, and verve while crucially retaining its themes of identity, curiosity, and rebellion. This adaptation used an adapted version of the text to make the narrative more relatable to teenage students while retaining the essence of the old narrative.

The most successful aspect of the adaptation was reshaping the narrative to fit the preferences of teen storytelling (Benabbes and AbdulHaleem Abu Taleb, 2024). The story felt much more involved and focused after giving Alice a known conflict (being kicked out of the debate club) and a clear enemy (the Queen of Hearts as the school bully). The journey with Alice has become more meaningful in modern times. Besides, using natural teenage dialogue also helped to engage the reader. Carroll’s Victorian English can be difficult for contemporary audiences to follow, and the adaptation’s modern conversational language gave Alice a more accurate feel.

Conclusion

This assignment developed a strategy of reworking Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into a modern high school setting to attract a teenage audience. However, the adaptation maintained the novel’s essential elements of identity, curiosity, and authority, updating the language, structure, and setting to reflect more accurately what would be acceptable in contemporary storytelling. The reworking showed how classic literature can stay relevant in reworking the Queen of Hearts into a high school bully, Wonderland into a social hierarchy and Alice’s nonsensical adventures into real-world challenges.

References

• Benabbes, S. and AbdulHaleem Abu Taleb, H. (2024). The effect of storytelling on the development of language and social skills in French as a foreign language classrooms. Heliyon, [online] 10(8), p.e29178. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e29178.
• Carroll, L. (1865). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. New York.
• Cheng, S. (2023). A review of interpersonal metafunction studies in systemic functional linguistics (2012–2022). Journal of world languages, 0(0). doi:https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2023-0026.
• Green, M.C. (2021). Transportation into Narrative Worlds. Entertainment-Education Behind the Scenes, pp.87–101. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63614-2_6.
• Leitch, T. (2018). Adaptation, the Genre. Adaptation, 1(2), pp.106–120. doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apn018.
• Long, L. (2024). What Is Reader Response? [online] cwi.pressbooks.pub. doi:https://cwi.pressbooks.pub/lit-crit/chapter/what-is-reader-response/.
• Mueller, C. and Salonia, M. (2022). Introduction: Curiosity, Identities, and Knowledge in Travel Writings on Asia. Springer, pp.1–28. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0124-9_1.
• Pincock, K. and Jones, N. (2020). Challenging Power Dynamics and Eliciting Marginalized Adolescent Voices Through Qualitative Methods. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 19, pp.1–11. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406920958895.
• Webber, C., Wilkinson, K., Duncan, L.G. and McGeown, S. (2023). Adolescents’ perspectives on the barriers to reading for pleasure. Literacy, 58(2). doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12359.