Auctor Ludens

Auctor Ludens PDF

Author: Gerald Guinness

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1986-01-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780915027200

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This is a book about play practice rather than play theory. Of course, practice presupposes theory, but here the editors choose to keep general theoretical assumptions under cover rather then force them into explicitness. The contributors to this volume were given free rein to discuss whatsoever aspect of literary play caught their fancy. The absence of a predetermined theoretical framework has resulted in an idiosyntractic volume on the different forms of play.

'Lector Ludens'

'Lector Ludens' PDF

Author: Michael Scham

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2014-09-17

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1442617403

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In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, debating the acceptability of games and recreation was serious business. With Lector Ludens, Michael Scham uses Cervantes’s Don Quijote and Novelas ejemplares as the basis for a wide-ranging exploration of early modern Spanish views on recreations ranging from cards and dice to hunting, attending the theater, and reading fiction. Shifting fluidly between modern theories of play, little-known Spanish treatises on leisure and games, and the evidence in Cervantes’s own works, Scham illuminates Cervantes’s intense fascination with games, play, and leisure, as well as the tensions in early modern Spain between the stern moralizing of the Counter-Reformation and the playfulness of Renaissance humanism.

Playtexts

Playtexts PDF

Author: Warren Motte

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2015-11

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0803290780

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“Not hubris but the ever self-renewing impulse to play calls new worlds into being.”—Nietzsche Parents and politicians have always taken play seriously. Its formative powers, its focus, its energy, and its ability to signify other things have drawn the attention of writers from Plato and Schiller to Wittgenstein, Nabokov, and Eco. The ease with which an election becomes perceived as a race, a political crisis as a football game, or an argument as a tennis match readily proves how much play means to contemporary life. Just how play confers meaning, however, is best revealed in literature, where meaning is perpetually at stake. “At stake” itself, the risk of a gamble, is only one intersection between play and life. Playtexts reveals numerous junctures where literary playfulness—seemingly so diverting and irrelevant—instead opens the most profound questions about creativity, community, value, and belief. How do authors play with their words and readers? Can literature proceed at all unless a reader is willing and able to play? No moralizing monologue, Playtexts is all for exuberance and creative surge: Breton’s construction of an antinovel, Gombrowicz’s struggle with adult formalities, Nabokov’s swats at the humorless, Sarrazin’s seductive notes, Eco’s recasting of spy and detective fiction, Reyes’s carnal metaphorics.

Play and the Picaresque

Play and the Picaresque PDF

Author: Gordana Yovanovich

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 9780802047045

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Analyses three important Latin American novels in an attempt to redefine the nature of the picaresque, especially in regard to the roles of spontaneous play and carnivalesque laughter.

Fiction Now

Fiction Now PDF

Author: Warren F. Motte

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1564785033

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Fiction Now reports on the current states of the novel in France, taking a series of soundings within the compass of innovative French writing since 2001. Chapters focus closely upon Jean Echenoz, Marie Redonnet, Christian Gailly, Lydie Salvayre, Gérard Gavarry, Hélène Lenoir, Patrick Lapeyre, and Christine Montalbetti. Each of the authors invoked exemplified in his or her work a different set of strategies, concerns, and approaches: one of them transposes the Book of Judith to the Parisian suburbs; another imagines the most taciturn of cowboys in the American West; still another goes well beyond death, into the afterlife of a concert pianist. Despite their diversity of theme and technique, these writers share a will to make French fiction new, and demonstrate compellingly that the novel as it is practiced in France today is an extremely vigorous, deeply enthralling, and richly plural cultural form.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens PDF

Author: Robert L. Patten

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-09-13

Total Pages: 848

ISBN-13: 0191061115

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The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction

Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction PDF

Author: Christian K. Messenger

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1983-05-31

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0231516614

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In this comprehensive and insightful study, Christian K. Messenger contends that American writers have always created characters at play in the sure knowledge that to be active in sport in America is to be in touch with its people, their traditions, and their fantasy lives. This is the first inclusive critical study of sport in American fiction with chapters on individual authors such as Hawthorne, Lardner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, as well as studies of sport in the literature of the frontier and in boys' formula fiction. A work of literary criticism, Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction also draws on the cultural history of American sport and leisure and on a century of American literature.

Literary Gaming

Literary Gaming PDF

Author: Astrid Ensslin

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-08-15

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0262548836

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A new analytical framework for understanding literary videogames, the literary-ludic spectrum, illustrated by close readings of selected works. In this book, Astrid Ensslin examines literary videogames—hybrid digital artifacts that have elements of both games and literature, combining the ludic and the literary. These works can be considered verbal art in the broadest sense (in that language plays a significant part in their aesthetic appeal); they draw on game mechanics; and they are digital-born, dependent on a digital medium (unlike, for example, conventional books read on e-readers). They employ narrative, dramatic, and poetic techniques in order to explore the affordances and limitations of ludic structures and processes, and they are designed to make players reflect on conventional game characteristics. Ensslin approaches these hybrid works as a new form of experimental literary art that requires novel ways of playing and reading. She proposes a systematic method for analyzing literary-ludic (L-L) texts that takes into account the analytic concerns of both literary stylistics and ludology. After establishing the theoretical underpinnings of her proposal, Ensslin introduces the L-L spectrum as an analytical framework for literary games. Based on the phenomenological distinction between deep and hyper attention, the L-L spectrum charts a work's relative emphases on reading and gameplay. Ensslin applies this analytical toolkit to close readings of selected works, moving from the predominantly literary to the primarily ludic, from online hypermedia fiction to Flash fiction to interactive fiction to poetry games to a highly designed literary “auteur” game. Finally, she considers her innovative analytical methodology in the context of contemporary ludology, media studies, and literary discourse analysis.

The Pathology of the English Renaissance

The Pathology of the English Renaissance PDF

Author: Elizabeth Mazzola

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9789004111950

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Challenging readings of Renaissance culture as an increasingly secular one, this work proposes instead that sacred symbols and practices still powerfully organized the English moral imagination, and that many ideas outlawed or forgotten by Protestant reformers shared a vital afterlife.

Semiotics

Semiotics PDF

Author: Roland Posner

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 3110179628

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This series of HANDBOOKS OF LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION SCIENCE is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction. For "classic" linguistics there appears to be a need for a review of the state of the art which will provide a reference base for the rapid advances in research undertaken from a variety of theoretical standpoints, while in the more recent branches of communication science the handbooks will give researchers both an verview and orientation. To attain these objectives, the series will aim for a standard comparable to that of the leading handbooks in other disciplines, and to this end will strive for comprehensiveness, theoretical explicitness, reliable documentation of data and findings, and up-to-date methodology. The editors, both of the series and of the individual volumes, and the individual contributors, are committed to this aim. The languages of publication are English, German, and French. The main aim of the series is to provide an appropriate account of the state of the art in the various areas of linguistics and communication science covered by each of the various handbooks; however no inflexible pre-set limits will be imposed on the scope of each volume. The series is open-ended, and can thus take account of further developments in the field. This conception, coupled with the necessity of allowing adequate time for each volume to be prepared with the necessary care, means that there is no set time-table for the publication of the whole series. Each volume will be a self-contained work, complete in itself. The order in which the handbooks are published does not imply any rank ordering, but is determined by the way in which the series is organized; the editor of the whole series enlist a competent editor for each individual volume. Once the principal editor for a volume has been found, he or she then has a completely free hand in the choice of co-editors and contributors. The editors plan each volume independently of the others, being governed only by general formal principles. The series editor only intervene where questions of delineation between individual volumes are concerned. It is felt that this (modus operandi) is best suited to achieving the objectives of the series, namely to give a competent account of the present state of knowledge and of the perception of the problems in the area covered by each volume.