Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature

"A series of wonderfully apt, economical, and witty readings of texts ranging from Breton's Nadja to writing of the 1980s. . . . Sparklingly interesting analytic and interpretive criticism."-Ross Chambers, author of Room for Maneuver. "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. Warren Motte is a professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Colorado. He is the author of Questioning Edmond Jbes(Nebraska 1990) and of articles in Romanic Review, French Forum, French Review, Romance Notes, and Romance Quarterly.