Slantwise Moves

There are, Douglas A. Guerra suggests in Slantwise Moves, “ways of understanding history” that can position us “alongside” our ostensible subjects of interest from the past without having to resort to the direct treatment of a thing (p. 102). Witness the “ways” of Guerra's own insinuating monograph, which is concerned as much with the “meta” dimensions of historical methodology as it is the familiar content of traditional history. What history we receive in Guerra's study is hardly the usual stuff of undergraduate survey courses and textbooks. His subject is the cultural utility and variability of gameplay, the multimedia manifestations of which he traces across the mid-nineteenth-century United States in an effort to locate those “slantwise moments of productive irony” when games reveal the practices and priorities of people's everyday lives (p. 12). As the title indicates, Slantwise Moves is not a straightforward history. It is a history about how Americans’ introduction to merchantable play—a play that involved everything from board games, card games, and fill-in-the-blank books to configuration puzzles, targeting games, and the imaginative license of literary fiction—was not only purposeful but also prophetic. On the one hand, the games Guerra examines helped engineer new forms of modern sociability among players. This was a moment when, the author contends, the “ludic” was widely perceived by participants from different classes and generations to be less an evasion of work per se than a spontaneous preparation for a more flexible mode of being in the world. On the other hand, the players on whom Guerra's study depends anticipated a postmodern cultural moment, such as our own, when the improvised habits of “association, invention, and connection” we have borrowed from an earlier informational age have provided a reconstituted and highly self-conscious basis for what passes as play today (p. 10

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