@article{THESIS,
      recid = {12824},
      author = {Ramsey, Elizabeth Helen Emily},
      title = {Play Objects, Play-Things: The Role of  <i>Spiel</i> in Goethe, Hoffmann, Brentano and  Kafka},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2024-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {This dissertation considers concepts of play in literary  texts by four German writers of the long nineteenth  century: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Clemens Brentano,  E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Franz Kafka. Unlike previous studies  which have focused on play in individual writers or texts,  this study identifies a historical trajectory (resonance)  of play in canonical writers where agency steadily decline  with the possibility of play for the individuals  represented in their texts, and its consequences. Taking  inspiration from the psychoanalytic approach to play of  Donald Winnicott, and the anthropological approaches of  Friedrich Schiller and Johan Huizinga, I argue that play  can be identified in the representation of self-development  (Bildung) in Goethe's oeuvre, as representative of the  Romantic self and imagination in two texts from 1816/7, and  in the deadly machinations of the state in Kafka, as well  as his characters' attempts to resist this. Play is more  than a symbol of linear psychological development or an  action children do; it can describe a whole attitude,  especially in how protagonists 'play by the rules' of texts  or treat objects in them as playthings for their own ends.  Play is ultimately representative of the status of agency  in different ways in these four writers, with Goethe  developing a sovereign notion of Spiel which I trace back  to the influence of Shakespeare and Machiavelli. Brentano  and Hoffmann's fairy tales deliberately question concepts  of identity using play objects such as books and dolls and  near-human robots. Kafka identifies Spiel both in the  machine of the state and in the repeated small movements  his protagonists make to try to elude it. In establishing a  new framework for the study of play in literature as  focusing on objects, not only in a psychoanalytic sense but  also a structural one; on identity, in the sense of play as  representing values and rules in a text, and relating it to  interdisciplinary theories of play, my thesis contributes  to the fields of Play Studies, Goethe Studies, German  Romanticism, and Kafka Studies in offering this new  theoretical approach. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12824},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.12824},
}