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Playstations.
Or, playing in earnest
Steven Connor
Origin: Static Issue 01
Content: PDF
A keynote talk given at the opening of the European Summer School
on Playtime! The Cultures of Play, Gaming and Sport, Institute
of Contemporary Arts, London, 26 July 2005.
“It seems more than a little incongruous
if not irresponsible to be proposing to devote so much time to
the topic of play and the empire of the unserious, during a period
in which the importance of being earnest is so evident and imperative
(though when is it not?) Actually, though, the comically-accelerated
history of play on which I am about to venture will try to suggest
that modern culture has been formed in part by the effort to take
play ever more seriously ...”
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Contributor:
Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature
and Theory at Birbeck College, London and Academic Director of
the London Consortium. He is a writer and broadcaster for radio
and the author of books on Dickens, Beckett, Joyce and post-war
British fiction, as well as of Postmodernist
Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 2nd edn 1996), Theory
and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), Dumbstruck:
A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000) and The Book of Skin
(London: Reaktion, 2003).
His book Fly is forthcoming
from Reaktion, and he is writing another book about the historical
poetics of the air. His website at
www.stevenconnor.com includes lectures, broadcasts, unpublished
work and work in progress.
Associated Links:
www.stevenconnor.com
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