Stefan Schubert
Play, Narrative, and American Modernities
As a cultural practice, narrative is often considered uniquely suited to textualize the experiences of modernity. This workshop aims to complement such an interest in the narratives of modernity by turning to a category that, to some of its proponents, is emphatically non-narrative: play. Indeed, discussions in game studies, not least in the context of the ludology-narratology debate, have accentuated ‘the ludic’ as an aesthetic, symbolic, or conceptual category in its own right. Thus understood, a ludic quality—an emphasis on interaction, a focus on winning, a suspension of the ‘serious,’ or a loosening of constraints of meaning—can be found in many different ‘texts’ and in a wide array of cultural sites: in literary texts, in political rhetoric, in (pop-)cultural performances, in games and sports, or in the gamification of education. In how it subverts, counters, or disrupts the more ‘orderly,’ linear qualities of narrative, playfulness is a socially symbolic dimension particularly well-suited to expressing, negotiating, and cushioning the social disruptions that mark processes of modernization, and modernities as such. In this sense, play emerges as a key idiom facilitating the kinds of self-reflexivity that mark modern societies, and American modernities in particular.
Our workshop therefore aims to explore the productivity of play and playfulness as categories for discussing the distinct qualities of (American) modernities. We are interested in case studies of texts, (video) games, or performative social interactions whose relationship to modernity becomes more legible or more meaningful when engaged with an interest in their ludic qualities. Topics we envision could include:
actual games, such as board and parlor games, that, beginning in the 19th century, made chief contributions to negotiating modernity and experiences of modernization;
video games, understood as a decidedly post-cinematic form of interactive storytelling or as a form of simulation;
texts emulating individual ludic dynamics, such as reality TV shows, twist films, or choose-your-own-adventure stories;
the playfulness of metafictional narration;
the play of signifiers in the performance of cultural identities, e.g. drag or race or class passing;
memes, boasting, tall tales, or bullshitting (Harry G. Frankfurt) as forms of speech that suspend seriousness in an imagined contest of outbidding the ‘opponent.’
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Program :
Birgit Bauridl (Regensburg): Zora Neale Hurston’s Cultural Performance and the Politics of Play and Place in the New York Narratives
In 2010, Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors rediscovered previously unknown short stories by Zora Neale Hurston and sparked a likewise previously unknown perspective on the author and anthropologist. “Does this sound like Zora Neale Hurston? […] probably not,” Carpio and Sollors mused in their introduction to the publication of the stories in Amerikastudien / American Studies 55.4 (2010). Unlike the ‘known’ stories, Hurston’s ‘new’ narratives are all set in Harlem. Fusing a Performance Studies perspective with notions of Critical Regionalism and drawing on well-established as well as on recent concepts by, e.g., Johan Huizinga, Victor Turner, Judith Butler, Diana Taylor, Douglas Reichert Powell, and Heike Paul, this paper zooms in on the playful appropriation and construction of New York City’s Harlem in Hurston’s “The Back Room” (1927) as well as in “The Country in the Woman” (1927) and “She Rock” (1933).
Drawing from concepts of performance (and of play as performance) that insist on its site-specificity, the paper argues that the performative interaction between play and place happens on different levels of the narrative communication and construction. Firstly, the female protagonists engage in play, in a theatrical sense, and playfulness to inter act with their modern, urban, and potentially disruptive spatial and social surroundings of Harlem, New York City. They thus en act their black female identities in this particular setting. Secondly, the narratives work with a theatrical quality that implements elements characteristic of corporeal, ephemeral performance such as site, bodies, and community/assembly (Turner, Butler). The narratives’ internal play and playfulness ultimately turn the stories themselves into playful reactions to, dialogues with, and performative constructions of 1920s/1930s Harlem and 1920s/1930s NYC—at times also in contrast to the rural South. As cultural performances, Hurston’s unknown narratives function as playful, liminal tools and potential repertoires for a (black female) navigation of modernity in the modern NYC space.
Katja Kanzler (Dresden): Westworld: Television’s ‘Quality Turn’ at the Crossroads of Narrative and Gameplay
In this paper, I want to discuss HBO’s new flagship-series Westworld (2016-) against the backdrop of what I hypothesize is an emergent trend in the phenomenon of ‘quality tv,’ a trend located at the crossroads of narrative and gameplay. I will approach ‘quality tv’ as a genre, following Jason Mittell’s conceptualization of genre as a discursive practice in which televisual texts and their paratexts negotiate the existence, contours, and meanings of genres, and associate them with particular formal or content-related properties. As a genre practice, quality tv deeply resonates with notions of the modern, not least in its self-stylization as post-conventional tv, as revolving around a dynamization of the medium’s previously formulaic conventions. Intermediality has been a significant item in this discourse, claiming that the television of quality has been renewing itself by appropriating elements of literature and of cinema. Yet in and around Westworld – a series very much tied to ‘quality tv’ – a different kind of inter-phenomenon becomes apparent: In multiple ways, the show incorporates elements of gameplay, ranging from its use of a theme-park setting to its complex work with the motif of the reboot. My paper will explore how the logics of narrative and of gameplay come together in Westworld , and how this interfacing resonates in the discourse of quality tv.
Sören Schoppmeier (FU Berlin): “There Are Better Options Than This” (i.e., Pony Lasers): Pony Island as Countergaming
As inherently computational artifacts, video games have repeatedly been described—for example, by Ian Bogost, Alexander R. Galloway, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin—as a cultural form particularly expressive of the current stage of modernity that is sometimes called ‘the algorithmic age’ (cf. panel 3 of this conference). Combining play and computation, video games appear to elicit fundamentally ludic engagements with modernity. Yet their elaborate fictional worlds and the illusion of player agency within these worlds usually work to conceal the technological apparatus behind these games. Recent metafictional indie games like the critically acclaimed 2016 release Pony Island , however, present a contrary move that accentuates not only the ‘game-ness’ of video games but also their status as software.
In this paper, I examine Pony Island through the lens of Galloway’s concept of “countergaming” (109). As a highly self-reflexive game about a game (one possessed by a demon who is the programmer of that game), Pony Island playfully draws attention to video games’ nature as computational artifacts. It constantly disrupts player expectations by juxtaposing conventional game mechanics with elements that break its magic circle, which furthermore reverberates thematically in the dissonant themes of ponies and demons. Pony Island not only repeatedly forces players to engage with the ‘code’ of the game within in order to ‘fix’ it, it also dissolves the boundary between in-game and out-game reality, for example, by crashing and requiring a reload of the game. The game thus plays with and, through its metafictional elements, tells a narrative about the concept of video games as such. As it relates player agency back to program code, coupling mastery of the game with control of its underlying mechanisms, Pony Island foregrounds the computational processes—which are themselves always already expressive, as, for example, Bogost and Wardrip-Fruin contend—usually concealed in other games, but it does so in ludic form. In this way, I argue, the game succeeds in creating a moment of “countergaming as gaming” as envisioned by Galloway (126), urging players to consider the invisible but decisive informatic structures that define not only video games but the algorithmic age in general.
Svenja Fehlhaber (Osnabrück): Critical Subversion and a Generative Vision: A Liminoid Reading of American Modernization in Nathan Asch’s The Office (1925)
Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, a group of American writers famously ‘played’ with literary expression to accommodate the new (temporal) quality of the modern world within their texts. While avant-garde modernists thus replaced ‘orderly’ traditional narratives with a new, yet equally controlled, aesthetic of speed, other writers engaged in an even more subversive form of ‘play,’ which co-opted this new modernist aesthetics for socio-critical purposes.
This paper introduces Nathan Asch’s forgotten novel The Office (1925) as an example of such an alternate form of ‘play’ in modern American letters. At the heyday of modernization in the United States, I argue, Asch’s novel did not simply seek to express the experience of modernity through experimental form. Instead, its ludic engagement aimed at challenging the dominantly affirmative discourse on American modernization, which had emerged in the domain of business and avant-garde modernism alike. Drawing on Victor Turner’s concept, my paper identifies The Office as a liminoid text, which “play [s] with the factors of [the dominant] culture,” including emergent modernist aesthetics, “ludic[ally]” appropriating and “defamiliariz[ing]” them to promote “alternative models for living […] in the direction of radical change” (Turner 40).
The paper proceeds from a short introduction to the overlapping discourses of speed in American business and avant-garde modernism towards an exemplary analysis of Asch’s novel. My reading reveals how The Office , on the level of theme and style, re-negotiated the effects of modernization (i.e. acceleration) on people’s lives. As I will demonstrate, the novel not only co-opts modernist techniques to critique the metropolitan regime of speed but in other instances, it also does so to reveal the inner plight or the moral decline of ‘successfully synchronized’ workers at the eponymous office. Ultimately, Asch’s novel complements this critical re-assessment with a generative feat: It rehabilitates comparatively slow styles and narrative modes and it promotes alternate forms of modern American life (and letters).
My examination of Nathan Asch’s forgotten novel reclaims an under-researched form of ‘play’ in modern American writing, which emerged alongside canonical modernism, yet countered the dominant discourse on American modernization to promote an alternate form of modern life.
Stefan Schubert (Leipzig): Playing Modernities? (Meta)Textuality, Transmediality, and Self-Reflexivity in the Video Game Alan Wake
In my presentation, I will investigate the video game Alan Wake for how it probes into notions of modernity through a self-reflexive turn towards its own mediality and textuality. Released in 2012 for the PC, Alan Wake is an action-adventure game that revolves around an eponymous writer, who seemingly gets trapped inside his own mystery/psychological horror novel. Players take control of Alan as he searches for his wife Alice in the small town of Bright Falls, fighting against a shadowy presence only referred to as ‘the Darkness.’ Along the way, the game relates to US (popular) culture particularly through numerous textual and genre references, specifically to film noir and the American Gothic tradition.
I will read Alan Wake as a reflection on textuality and mediality in the context of modernity. Like some other contemporary (but often ‘indie’ rather than mainstream) video games, Alan Wake prominently discusses its inner workings and thus self-reflexively deals with its own narrativity and textuality. However, beyond that, I also understand its focus on ‘old’ and ‘new’ media—by metatextually presenting itself as a novel to be played—as a reflection of the liminality between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ that marks modernity. While, in terms of medium, it is clearly a video game, it consciously makes use of narrative techniques from novels, films, and TV, and it features numerous references to a variety of media and genres. Accordingly, I will argue that Alan Wake mirrors its protagonists’ ontological and epistemic anxieties and fears on a metatextual level as narrative and medial anxieties about the place of this new medium in the media landscape.
