Wonderland Reimagined: How Emoji Breathes New Life into a Classic
Looking Glass Institute for Digital Narratives
In an age when literary culture faces genuine existential threats—declining readership, competition from streaming media, the collapse of attention spans—along comes a work that dares to ask a vital question: what if we stopped treating classic literature as museum pieces and started treating them as living, breathing texts that can evolve with each generation? Danslav Slavenskoj’s “Alice in Wonderland: Emoji Edition” answers that question with creativity, intelligence, and a genuine love for both Carroll’s original vision and contemporary modes of communication.
This is not, as some will inevitably claim, a “dumbing down” of Carroll. Rather, it is a brilliant act of translation—one that recognizes that language itself is always in flux, and that each generation must make the classics their own if those classics are to survive at all.
Translation as Renewal
Let us be clear about what Slavenskoj has accomplished here: this is a translation, every bit as legitimate as translating Carroll into French, Spanish, or Japanese. The target language just happens to be contemporary youth vernacular enriched with emoji—a language that billions of people now use daily to communicate complex emotions, ideas, and narratives.
And what a rich language it is! When Alice falls down the 🐰🕳️, we don’t just read about it—we see the rabbit, we see the hole. The visual element adds a layer of immediate comprehension that complements rather than replaces the text. Young readers (and many older ones) have been trained by years of digital communication to parse these hybrid text-image messages with remarkable sophistication. Slavenskoj meets them where they are.
Consider the opening: “Alice was getting super bored of just sitting with her sister on the riverbank with literally nothing to do.” Critics will clutch their pearls over “super” and “literally,” but these word choices accomplish something important: they eliminate the distance between reader and character. This Alice speaks like a real contemporary young person, making her thoughts and feelings immediately accessible. We’re not reading about some remote Victorian child; we’re reading about someone who could be texting us right now.
Visual Literacy and the Emoji Revolution
The integration of emoji throughout the text represents a sophisticated understanding of how contemporary readers process information. We live in an increasingly visual culture—not because we’ve become less literate, but because we’ve become differently literate. The ability to decode complex messages that blend text, image, and symbol is a genuine literacy skill, one that this adaptation both requires and develops.
When the White Rabbit pulls a ⏱️ from his pocket, when Alice encounters a 🐛 smoking a hookah, when the Cheshire 😸 grins from its tree branch—these emoji don’t replace imagination; they provide anchors for it. They create what cognitive scientists call “dual coding,” engaging both verbal and visual processing systems simultaneously. Research suggests this actually enhances comprehension and memory, particularly for younger readers.
Moreover, Slavenskoj shows real artistry in emoji selection. The choice to use both filled and outlined card suit symbols (♥♡♦♢♠♤♣♧) demonstrates attention to nuance. The use of 🫲🏻 (hand-in-hand) in “walking 🫲🏻-in-🫲🏻 with Dinah” is both economical and evocative. These are not random insertions but carefully considered visual elements that enhance the text.
Accessibility and Inclusion
Perhaps most importantly, this adaptation opens Carroll’s masterpiece to readers who might otherwise never engage with it. I’ve spent twenty years teaching literature to diverse student populations, and I can testify: the language barrier of Victorian prose is real. It’s not insurmountable, certainly, but for many students—particularly those for whom English is a second language, those with reading difficulties, or those who simply haven’t been raised in homes filled with books—19th-century syntax and vocabulary present genuine obstacles.
This edition removes those obstacles without sacrificing the essential Carroll: the logical games, the wordplay, the narrative surprises, the philosophical depth. The famous “Who are you?” conversation with the Caterpillar retains its existential weight. The Mad Hatter’s tea party remains a brilliant satire of social conventions. The Pool of Tears still explores Alice’s identity crisis with psychological acuity.
A student who reads this edition and falls in love with Alice’s adventures might then be motivated to seek out Carroll’s original, approaching it with context and enthusiasm rather than dread. Even if they don’t, they’ve still encountered one of literature’s great explorations of childhood, identity, and the absurd. Surely that’s worth celebrating?
The Voice of Contemporary Youth
Traditionalists will object to Alice’s voice—all those “likes” and “totallys” and “OMGs.” But these critics miss the point entirely. Carroll himself was writing in the vernacular of his time, capturing how real children actually spoke (or at least, an artful approximation thereof). The language felt natural to Victorian readers precisely because it reflected their contemporary speech patterns.
Slavenskoj is doing exactly the same thing for 2025. When this Alice thinks “Like, what’s even the point of a 📖 if it doesn’t have pictures or people talking to each other?” she’s expressing the exact same sentiment as Carroll’s Alice, just in a voice that contemporary readers will recognize as authentic. The substance hasn’t changed; only the surface has been updated.
And what’s wrong with that? Every generation of Shakespearean actors updates pronunciation, pacing, and emphasis to suit contemporary theatrical conventions. Every new translation of Homer or Dante makes different choices about diction and tone. This is how classics survive—not by being frozen in amber, but by being constantly renewed.
The Deeper Structure Remains
Crucially, Slavenskoj understands that Carroll’s genius lies not in his specific word choices but in his narrative structure, his logical games, and his ability to make the familiar strange. All of this survives the translation intact.
The shape-poems still work (the Mouse’s tail tale). The mathematical jokes still land (Alice’s calculations about falling to the center of the Earth). The logical paradoxes remain paradoxical (the Pigeon’s argument about girls and serpents both eating eggs). The social satire is perhaps even sharper when rendered in contemporary language—the Caucus-race as absurdist commentary on politics feels startlingly relevant in our current moment.
What Slavenskoj has done is excavate the fundamental Carroll from beneath layers of Victorian prose and made him available to a new generation. The dreamer remains; only the language of the dream has changed.
Conclusion: Embrace the New
“Alice in Wonderland: Emoji Edition” represents exactly the kind of bold experimentation literary culture needs. In an age when reading itself is under threat, we should celebrate every genuine attempt to make literature live for new audiences.
Is this edition perfect? No. Some translation choices are more successful than others. The contemporary slang will date (just as Carroll’s prose has dated). But that’s fine—perfection isn’t the goal. Access is the goal. Joy is the goal. Engagement is the goal.
Slavenskoj has given us a gift: a chance to see Wonderland anew, to experience Carroll’s genius through the lens of contemporary communication, to discover that the essential magic survives translation. Some will reject this gift out of hand, clinging to notions of literary purity that serve mainly to exclude and gatekeep. But those with open minds and generous spirits will recognize this for what it is: a love letter to Carroll, written in the language of 2025.
Welcome to Wonderland, reimagined. It’s still curious and curiouser down here, and there’s room for everyone—even those who prefer their rabbits rendered as 🐰.
Dr. Zara Lian is Associate Professor at the Looking Glass Institute for Digital Narratives and author of Reading in the Digital Age: New Literacies for New Media and Emoji and Meaning: Visual Language in Contemporary Communication.