Joe Moshenska
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780804798501
- eISBN:
- 9781503608740
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804798501.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This chapter opens with an ambiguous set of objects collected by a Dutch woman named Margrieta van Varick and described as “Indian Babies,” possibly brought with her from the Dutch East Indies to New ...
More
This chapter opens with an ambiguous set of objects collected by a Dutch woman named Margrieta van Varick and described as “Indian Babies,” possibly brought with her from the Dutch East Indies to New England, and relates them to the practice of iconoclastic child’s play in Malaysia. It repositions iconoclastic child’s play in a fraught colonial context and asks how the play of other cultures is to be interpreted. Beginning with ethnographic and psychoanalytic discussions of child’s play by Lévi-Strauss, Winnicott, and others, it then moves to consider the category of the fetish as one that has long been intertwined with the status of children and their playing. It uses the contested status of this category--as an object both replete with, and devoid of, meaning--to reconsider the fetish as plaything both in sixteenth-century Guinea and in Adorno’s writing on artworks and children’s games.Less
This chapter opens with an ambiguous set of objects collected by a Dutch woman named Margrieta van Varick and described as “Indian Babies,” possibly brought with her from the Dutch East Indies to New England, and relates them to the practice of iconoclastic child’s play in Malaysia. It repositions iconoclastic child’s play in a fraught colonial context and asks how the play of other cultures is to be interpreted. Beginning with ethnographic and psychoanalytic discussions of child’s play by Lévi-Strauss, Winnicott, and others, it then moves to consider the category of the fetish as one that has long been intertwined with the status of children and their playing. It uses the contested status of this category--as an object both replete with, and devoid of, meaning--to reconsider the fetish as plaything both in sixteenth-century Guinea and in Adorno’s writing on artworks and children’s games.
Joe Moshenska
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780804798501
- eISBN:
- 9781503608740
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804798501.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This book begins with the observation that, during the English Reformation, holy things taken from churches and monasteries were on occasion not smashed or burned but instead given to children as ...
More
This book begins with the observation that, during the English Reformation, holy things taken from churches and monasteries were on occasion not smashed or burned but instead given to children as toys. Iconoclasm has tended to feature prominently in narratives of modernity as a process of disenchantment, sometimes understood as the cultural diminution of playfulness: this book asks how these narratives might have to change once we recognize that iconoclasm and child’s play were periodically one and the same. Each chapter begins with an example of iconoclastic child’s play in practice--from locations in England, Germany, and East Asia, involving objects from broken crucifixes to wooden sculptures. The chapters then move outward from these starting points to ask what iconoclasm as child’s play can tell us about the ways in which children, their play, and objects more broadly are made to assume meanings. In pursuing these questions the book draws consistently on major and minor sixteenth-century figures--Erasmus, Bruegel, Spenser--but also ranges backward and forward to consider biblical, classical, and patristic understandings of play, as well as more recent thinkers including Walter Benjamin, D. W. Winnicott, T. W. Adorno, Alfred Gell, Ian Hacking, and Michael Taussig. These figures are used not so much to theorize iconoclasm as child’s play as to consider how this phenomenon might inflect the ways in which we seek to interpret and to organize children, play, and the past.Less
This book begins with the observation that, during the English Reformation, holy things taken from churches and monasteries were on occasion not smashed or burned but instead given to children as toys. Iconoclasm has tended to feature prominently in narratives of modernity as a process of disenchantment, sometimes understood as the cultural diminution of playfulness: this book asks how these narratives might have to change once we recognize that iconoclasm and child’s play were periodically one and the same. Each chapter begins with an example of iconoclastic child’s play in practice--from locations in England, Germany, and East Asia, involving objects from broken crucifixes to wooden sculptures. The chapters then move outward from these starting points to ask what iconoclasm as child’s play can tell us about the ways in which children, their play, and objects more broadly are made to assume meanings. In pursuing these questions the book draws consistently on major and minor sixteenth-century figures--Erasmus, Bruegel, Spenser--but also ranges backward and forward to consider biblical, classical, and patristic understandings of play, as well as more recent thinkers including Walter Benjamin, D. W. Winnicott, T. W. Adorno, Alfred Gell, Ian Hacking, and Michael Taussig. These figures are used not so much to theorize iconoclasm as child’s play as to consider how this phenomenon might inflect the ways in which we seek to interpret and to organize children, play, and the past.
Sascha Bru
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748639250
- eISBN:
- 9780748651931
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748639250.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter discusses the Partito Politico Futurista, which is a modernist literary movement, specifically focusing on its trajectory and the last years of futurism's ‘first’ or heroic phase. It ...
More
This chapter discusses the Partito Politico Futurista, which is a modernist literary movement, specifically focusing on its trajectory and the last years of futurism's ‘first’ or heroic phase. It emphasises that a different form of experimentation emerged in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's ‘literary’ work as he turned to law as an entity of aesthetic play.Less
This chapter discusses the Partito Politico Futurista, which is a modernist literary movement, specifically focusing on its trajectory and the last years of futurism's ‘first’ or heroic phase. It emphasises that a different form of experimentation emerged in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's ‘literary’ work as he turned to law as an entity of aesthetic play.
