The Modernist Playground: Ludic Gestures, Literary Games

"The Modernist Playground: Ludic Gestures, Literary Games" examines works by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, in order to define "ludic modernism." Bringing the "new formalism" and the "new aestheticism" to bear on modernist studies, the dissertation figures aesthetic autonomy as a playground: a free, egalitarian, yet knowingly circumscribed space that enables socio-political engagement. The dissertation draws upon a range of theories of play, while the central definition of ludic modernism derives from the work of Mihai Spariosu, who argues that play can be both rational and prerational. Ludic modernism strategically mingles these categories. Such works exceed the strictures of instrumental reason, challenge categories of thought, and renegotiate rational discourses such that propositional ideals might be borne out in practice. The Introduction and Conclusion sketch the dissertation's theoretical terrain, while the four chapters are organized by ludic touchstones: Toys, Labyrinths, Masks, and Puppets, respectively. Chapter one situates Stein's Tender Buttons amid her views on maternity and education, reading her poems as verbal toys whose impish language revels in imaginative possibility. Playing with them teaches readers to defy and redefine grammar and ideology. The second chapter looks to a board game that Joyce played while writing Ulysses. Called Labyrinth, it becomes an interpretive guide to the novel, through which Christian and classical traditions are reconceived as games in their own right. Chapter three shows how Eliot doffs a mask of symbolist irony and dons one of his own making, combining a cubist's eye for the construction of tribal masks with an acute understanding of their role in ritual dance. The shattered planes of The Waste Land are read as a staged performance and rite of cultural renewal. In the fourth chapter, the ludic symbolism of Woolf's Three Guineas and Between the Acts is used to complicate reductive notions of personal and aesthetic autonomy, suggesting that individuals can become puppets to their reason. The chapter reads traces of Plato's Allegory of the Cave in Between the Acts, mapping a potential strategy for freeing such puppets into a rationality better oriented toward a progressive future.