... play: namely, the importance that the producers of sixiang place on imparting a tone of conviction and purpose to the presentation of their arguments. To draw attention to the difference between Chinese certitude and European self-reflexivity as styles of rhetorical persuasion, I include a contrastive...

...J. T. Barbarese Writers and poets who turn to translation may do so more out of self-interest than a sense of indebtedness, and the emphasis on translation as playful homage, among the permanent debts to modernism, along with the gradual disappearance of the institutional study of foreign languages...

... the production of what Guy Debord called “spectacles,” I turn to three recent digital games that problematize gamification: SPENT (2011), Third World Farmer (2006), and Thresholdland (2010). Each of these games repurposes a different digital game genre (the role-playing game, the construction and...

.... 2007 . Dialectic of Enlightenment . 1st ed. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press . Huizinga Johan . 1950 . Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play- Element in Culture . Boston : Beacon Press . Khan Azeen . Forthcoming . “ The Subaltern Clinic .” boundary 2 . Kiang...

... considers the repetitive aspect of children’s playful engagements. The essay claims that children’s play is a crucial topic that has effectively fallen by the wayside. It also insists that children’s play instances a mode of thinking that extends beyond itself. It has the character of a model: “Folk...

... subjects and objects in time. The essay shows how the things in Suzan-Lori Parks’s play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and Kara Walker’s cutout Middle Passages reorient subjects in time. Demonstrating a relationship between history, as a temporal category, and notions of the...

...Dawn Lundy Martin This dossier on race and innovation collects a diverse group of poets who engage the following questions in their work: Is there perhaps something about innovation or experimentation that gives race a new name, a new dimension? Is there room for black-hand sides, coon play, other...

... tension. Under the explicit guidance of John Borthwick Gilchrist, the Hindi vernacular was shaped through linguistic pogroms. At the same time, Lallu Jee Lal’s training in Braj Bhāsa, as well as his intimate knowledge of the long history of Braj-Sanskrit and Braj-Urdu interactions, came into play in...

... revocation of all of Gass’s past work, especially the best of it, is sounded. We are thus left with the question: Is this new novel the biggest fake of all? In this way, reading such a novel puts its would-be critic in the position of either spoiling the joke or playing along with it. Is this revolting...

... the implications for a restructuring of life now playing out in Japan. The focus is especially on a quality not always associated with globalization: stillness, both as an element of contemporary crisis, and of the possible life to come. © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 eco-city energy...

... this essay. But I also consider another: the emergence of new practices for postmortem care/memorial that relieve social intimates (notably family) of the responsibilities of tending to the dead. In an era where privatization and “self-responsibility” now extend to death, how does sociality get played...

... play as functional elements of their craft. With this change a new scholarly myth begins to emerge, giving us a new scholar-hero: a sophist with close ties to the world of poetry and poetics. © 2010 by Duke University Press 2010 This essay was meant to be included in “American Poetry After 1975...

... poems' complicated play with temporality interacts with his rapid canonization. © 2010 by Duke University Press 2010 Book Reviewed: John Ashbery, Collected Poems, 1956–1987 , ed. Mark Ford (Library of America, No. 187) (New York: Library of America, 2008). Hereafter, this work is cited...

..., rage, longing, and so on. In the second part of this essay, I attempt one such analysis of a fictional text, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy , in which militarization plays a role both as a form of representation and as a quality of writing itself. Insofar as the novel demonstrates how militarization...

... absolute and as the only available alternative to absolute sovereignty being a state of nature (or more accurately what Pettit 2008 calls a “second state of nature,” one in which language plays a key role). In that state of nature, the only possible political relation is what Hobbes calls a war of “all...

...Matthew Charles; Howard Eiland Although it is well known that Walter Benjamin played a leading role in the antebellum German Youth Movement, withdrawing from the presidency of the Berlin Independent Students Association and from other reformist activities only with the onset of World War I...

...Sami R. Khatib This essay elaborates on the dialectics of practice and play in Walter Benjamin’s pedagogical writings. Arguing that his earlier politics of “pure means” is still operative in his later materialist pedagogy of proletarian purposiveness, the essay follows Benjamin’s project of undoing...

... creates an island in this space of active play, and it thereby has a singular playful presence in the child’s world.20 The section entitled “Colors” in Berlin Childhood around 1900 pre- cisely problematizes the idea of active mimetism in the case of colors. It establishes the reversal of the...

...Brian Elliott This essay argues that the key to Benjamin’s political thought lies in his appreciation of aesthetic production. Avoiding both uncritical celebration and fatalistic condemnation of the role played by modern technologies within production, Benjamin articulates a nuanced interpretation...

... unemployable to the bottom of the social and economic pyramid, and perpetual warfare on national and global fronts. Antonio Gramsci's analysis of “passive revolution” seems cogent for this moment, particularly for the ways media and other cultural forms play a significant role in mobilizing or disorganizing...