ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses human interactions as sites of learning and knowledge, alongside processes of mapping and alternate cartographies in Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. What relationships between words, actions, and place emerge when Carroll's characters embark on projects of spatial discovery? Close reading of the Snark is informed by, on the one hand, Carroll's contributions to the development of symbolic logic, and, on the other, contemporary spatial theories that posit a codependency between the geographical and the historical in the making of place—theories that Carroll's text anticipates. As it acknowledges and celebrates the incidence of the unknown—of spaces of otherness—in acts of placemaking, Carroll's text interrogates understandings of space and place in Late Victorian Britain, as well as the conditions of placemaking in the context of nineteenth-century imperial expansion. Simultaneously, Carroll's nonsense offers insight into inherited anxieties and tensions that are latent in our contemporary approaches to design.
