Play in the Age of Goethe

Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800

Edgar Landgraf, Elliott Schreiber (Herausgeber)

Buch | Softcover

336 Seiten

2020
Bucknell University Press,U.S. (Verlag)
978-1-68448-206-1 (ISBN)

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The essays in this volume discuss critical developments in the philosophy, pedagogy, psychology, politics, and poetics of play around 1800. They illustrate that, in this time period, the parameters are set that continue to guide our debates about what are good rather than bad games or practices of play.

We are inundated with game play today. Digital devices offer opportunities to play almost anywhere and anytime. No matter our age, gender, social, cultural, or educational background—we play. Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800 is the first book-length work to explore how the modern discourse of play was first shaped during this pivotal period (approximately 1770-1830). The eleven chapters illuminate critical developments in the philosophy, pedagogy, psychology, politics, and poetics of play as evident in the work of major authors of the period including Lessing, Goethe, Kant, Schiller, Pestalozzi, Jacobi, Tieck, Jean Paul, Schleiermacher, and Fröbel. While drawing on more recent theories of play by thinkers such as Jean Piaget, Donald Winnicott, Jost Trier, Gregory Bateson, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Henricks, and Patrick Jagoda, the volume shows the debates around play in German letters of this period to be far richer and more complex than previously thought, as well as more relevant for our current engagement with play. Indeed, modern debates about what constitutes good rather than bad practices of play can be traced to these foundational discourses.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

EDGAR LANDGRAF is a professor of German at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He studied philosophy and literary theory in Zurich, Chicago, and Baltimore. In addition to play studies, his research interests include: critical improvisation studies; German Romanticism; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature, aesthetics, and philosophy; sociological approaches to literature; neo-cybernetics, posthumanism, and Nietzsche. ELLIOTT SCHREIBER is an associate professor of German studies at Vassar College in New York. He is author of The Space of Autonomy: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Topography of Modernity, as well as articles on numerous authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently at work on a book that investigates the rise of the discourse of imaginative play in Enlightenment and Romantic pedagogy, and its development through the genre of the German literary fairy tale.

List of Illustrations
Introduction: Play in the Age of Goethe and Today
            Part 1: Free Play
Chapter 1: Beauty and Erotic Play: Anacreontic Poetry’s Transformation of Aesthetic Philosophy
Christian P. Weber
Chapter 2: Free Play in German Idealism and Poststructuralism
Samuel Heidepriem
            Part 2: Games of Chance
Chapter 3: “Mit dem Spiele spielen”: Lessing’s Play for Tolerance
Edgar Landgraf
Chapter 4: Play with Memory and Its Topoi: Faust
Nicholas Rennie
            Part 3: Children’s Play
Chapter 5: Narcissus at Play: Goethe, Piaget, and the Passage from Egocentric to Social Play
Elliott Schreiber
Chapter 6: Playthings: Goethe’s Favorite Toys
Patricia Anne Simpson
Chapter 7: Kindergarten and the Pedagogy of Play in the German Educational Revolution
Ian F. McNeely
            Interlude
Chapter 8: Invective, Eulogy, Play: Jacobi’s Sock 1799
Christiane Frey
            Part 4: The Play of Language
Chapter 9: Between Speaking and Listening: Jean Paul’s Word-Play
Michael Powers
Chapter 10: Authorship, Translation, Play: Schleiermacher’s Metalangual Poetics
David Martyn
Chapter 11: Playing with Words in Early German Romanticism
Brian Tucker
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	21.08.2020
Reihe/Serie	New Studies in the Age of Goethe
Co-Autor	Christian P. Weber, Samuel Heidepriem, Nicholas Rennie
Zusatzinfo	5 b&w images
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-68448-206-2 / 1684482062
ISBN-13	978-1-68448-206-1 / 9781684482061
Zustand	Neuware