Cultural History of Chess-Players (eBook)

Minds, Machines, and Monsters

John Sharples (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
232 Seiten
Manchester University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5261-2055-7 (ISBN)

Infos

This inquiry concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea that the chess-player has become a fragmented collection of images, underpinned by challenges to, and confirmations of, chess s status as an intellectually-superior and socially-useful game, particularly since the medieval period. Yet, the chess-player is an understudied figure. No previous work has shone a light on the chess-player itself. Increasingly, chess-histories have retreated into tidy consensus. This work aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity. To this end, this book, utilising a wide range of sources, including newspapers, periodicals, detective novels, science-fiction, and comic-books, is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to themes of mind, machine, and monster. -- .

Autor

John Sharples is an independent historian

Inhalt

Introduction: ‘Of magic look and meaning’: themes concerning the cultural chess-player
Part I: Minds
1 Sinner, melancholic, and animal: three lives of the chess-player in medieval and early-modern literature
2 ‘A quiet game of chess?’: respectability in urban and literary space
3 Elementary: the chess-player and literary-detective
Part II: Machines
4 Future shocks: IBM’s Deep Blue and the Automaton Chess-Player, 1997-1769
5 A haunted mind: Kasparov and the machines
6 ‘Everything was black’: locating monstrosity in representations of the Automaton Chess-Player
Part III: Monsters
7 Red, black, white, and blue: American monsters
8 Performance notes: absence and presence in Reykjavik, Iceland, 1972
9 Kapow!: the chess-player in comic-books, 1940-53
Epilogue: exploding heads and the death of the chess-player
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 30.10.2017
• Verlagsort: Manchester
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Freizeit / Hobby ► Spielen / Raten
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Spielen / Lernen ► Abenteuer / Spielgeschichten
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie
• Schlagworte: animal • automaton chess-player • child prodigy • Detective Fiction • Masculinities • Melancholic • monstrosity • monstrous bodies • Moralities • Sinner • statuesque chess-player • Superhero • transhuman
• ISBN-10: 1-5261-2055-0 / 1526120550
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5261-2055-7 / 9781526120557