“What if we were to read the philosophical tradition again from the top, noticing everywhere the ideas of ‘play’ and ‘games’ come up, and to try to give some account of how they are all related?”
“In Literature, Mimesis, and Play: Essays in Literary Theory (1982), Spariosu adapts sections of his doctoral dissertation into a monograph, which he goes on to unfold across subsequent book-length studies”
“Based on the four essays included here on Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, The Eternal Husband by Dostoevsky, and the work of Malcolm Lowry, the original thesis seems to have been about the development of the novel out of epic and romance genres”
“Spariosu’s thesis about play, to which he will recur in order to elaborate it in Dionysus Reborn (1989), God of Many Names (1991), and Wreath of Wild Olive (1997)”
“the formulation in overview: “The basic premises underlying this history,” Spariosu states in the foreword, “are 1) that, at least since Plato and Aristotle, mimesis and play have gone hand in hand, and 2) that both theses concepts can be traced back to, and have served as instruments for, a domination- or power-principle which lies at the foundation of Western civilization.””
“citing Huizinga and Caillois, but also Hutt’s “Exploration and Play in Children,” Bateson’s “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” concept, and Susanna Miller’s Psychology of Play. In the course of the chapter Spariosu deals with Homer and Plato, Kant and Schiller, existentialists and behaviorists, Freud’s “Writers and Daydreaming” and Piaget’s Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood, game-theorists and paradigm-shifters in math and science, Miller’s Gods and Games: Towards a Theology of Play and Muller’s Science and Criticism, and other lesser-known (to me at least) figures like Fink, “Eigen and Winkler’s glass-pearl game”, Ehrmann, and Vaihinger of the all-important “as if””