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Drawing on Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, it proposes “mental recreation” as a form of learning-through-play where pleasure and pedagogy become compatible and sometimes indistinguishable. The essay analyzes mechanisms such as defamiliarizing reversals and inversions, riddle-like conversations, modeled cerebral play, and the musical properties of language. It concludes that pleasures can be taught and that learning can induce pleasure while reflecting Carroll’s blend of earnest logic and playful poetics.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/mental-recreation-in-wonderland-article/591570/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/mental-recreation-in-wonderland-article/591570.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"supergirl","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-22","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":81},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"What is “mental recreation” according to the author?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"It is a mode of engaging the mind through games, word problems, and conceptual play that nourishes cerebral pleasure rather than treating learning and pleasure as opposites.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"How does the essay challenge the didacticism–optimism dichotomy?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"It argues that optimism and didacticism are not opposites or a simple dichotomy, and that Carroll’s work can combine instruction with pleasure in a non-contradictory way.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"What four mechanisms does Carroll use to teach readers to play with their minds?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"Carroll distorts familiar material to defamiliarize, uses riddle-like conversations to sustain puzzlement, models cerebral play for readers to emulate, and highlights the musical properties of language.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},591570,1792438908,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":81,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},962088121634,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_9964176cb1d06d4a9deccf72a44ae3dc","Mental Recreation in Wonderland  \n•  \nKate Pendlebury  \nThe author argues that children’s books are not, as commonly held, either didactic or entertaining and that successful juvenile literature teaches what Lewis Carroll, who wrote Alice in Wonderland, termed “mental recreation.” Pendlebury contends that learning and play, far from being opposites, can closely resemble one another and sometimes even seem indistinguishable. Using Carroll’s works as an example of the delight possible in conceptual play, she explores how his Alice stories teach readers to engage in mental recreation by using defamiliarizing reversals and inversions, offering riddle-like conversations, demonstrating how to play with words and ideas, and eliciting the basic pleasures of music through language. Keywords: children’s literature; mental recreation; play with ideas; play with words  \nMental Recreation in Wonderland  \nIn university English departments , scholars often tell their students that children’s books fall on one or the other side of an instruction-entertainment divide or, more subtly, that the genre exhibits a tension between the two faculties. Few scholars, however, actually believe it. Perry Nodelman, perhaps the most notable commentator on the relationship between pleasure and pedagogy in juvenile literature, writes that the most successful works“are trying to be optimistic and didactic at once,” which seems “inherently self-contradictory” and “leads to ambivalence, subtlety—resonance.” Inferior children’s books, meanwhile, are “either more purely didactic or more purely optimistic,” dispositions that “represent two opposite ways in which adults like to address children, based . . . on different ways of thinking about how children differ from adults.”1 I challenge the notion that optimism and didacticism are opposites, that they are a dichotomy. Using Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories as exemplary texts, I invite readers to engage in cerebral play and, by doing so, to learn about both thinking and pleasure.  \n41  \nAmerican Journal of Play, volume 9, number 1 © The Strong [Contact Kate Pendlebury at k.s.pendlebury@gmail.com](Contact Kate Pendlebury at k.s.pendlebury@gmail.com)  \nI begin by describing a paradigm in which pleasure is cognate with improvement before I briefly discuss Carroll’s “mental recreations”—a set of games and word problems he created towards the end of his life with the express goal of nourishing cerebral pleasure. The Alice books are probably more effective catalysts of play than these recreations because they invite their readers to experience entertainment and instruction as not only compatible, but intimates, and even indistinguishable from one another. The games and problems, however, have an unavoidable pedagogical goal even though they are designed to be enjoyed. My argument covers some familiar ground: much of the writing on literary nonsense, which treats Carroll as canonic, focuses on the genre’s concern with logic and play with meaning;2 and numerous linguists, philosophers, and literary theorists have explored Carroll’s instructive and entertaining manipulation of language and concepts.3 So, too, Jan Susina has noted the importance of play and games not only in the Alice books but in the corpus of Carroll’s academic and amusing literature.4 And Kathleen Blake has remarked that although “the Alices are famous for being playful and moral-less . . . without explicit ulterior motive or benefit . . . they do bear a relation to reality and say something about life.”5 I argue that Carroll aims to teach his readers not so much propositional knowledge “about life,” but rather a specific type of procedural knowledge: “how to” engage in mental recreation. Hence, I will describe four mechanisms that Carroll uses to teach his readers to play with their minds: he distorts familiar material to defamiliarize the reader; presents conversations that have a riddlelike character to invite continued puzzlement; models cerebral play fo","cbCaia6vKgH77wGi","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaia6vKgH77wGi","pdf",109453,15,"English","# Pleasure and pedagogy in juvenile literature\n## Challenging the didacticism–optimism dichotomy\n# Carroll’s “mental recreations” and the Alice books\n## Learning and entertainment as compatible\n# Four mechanisms for mental recreation\n## Distortion, riddling conversation, modeled play, musical language\n# Feeding the mind\n## Two kinds of pleasure: elemental and alert","[{\"question\":\"What is “mental recreation” according to the author?\",\"answer\":\"It is a mode of engaging the mind through games, word problems, and conceptual play that nourishes cerebral pleasure rather than treating learning and pleasure as opposites.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the essay challenge the didacticism–optimism dichotomy?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that optimism and didacticism are not opposites or a simple dichotomy, and that Carroll’s work can combine instruction with pleasure in a non-contradictory way.\"},{\"question\":\"What four mechanisms does Carroll use to teach readers to play with their minds?\",\"answer\":\"Carroll distorts familiar material to defamiliarize, uses riddle-like conversations to sustain puzzlement, models cerebral play for readers to emulate, and highlights the musical properties of language.\"}]","Mental Recreation in Wonderland - article | PDF",1792072746,23]