Douglas A. Guerra. Slantwise Moves

Douglas A. Guerra is good at asking unusual questions and looking for answers in unexpected places. The strength of Slantwise Moves lies in its discussion of several of the games that were played in mid-nineteenth century America. Guerra is keenly attentive to the mechanics of game play and meditates on what these tell us about minds and manners. Game design, like architecture, clothing, or etiquette, reflects values and thought patterns. Guerra takes the insights he gains from his investigation of games and analyzes some well-known works of literature. The games provide new readings of the literature, and the print texts reinforce the conclusions he draws from game mechanics. As cultural historians know, one of the problems with studying historical texts and artifacts is coming to grips with the relationship between authors, works, and audiences. Authorial intent, genre, media, and reception aren’t mechanically or predictably related, even if we successfully figure out what audience reactions might have been or what ideas authors tried to communicate. It is as misleading to present audiences as having “free interpretive agency” as it is to argue that works determine their own reading. Guerra presents the playing of a game as an act, one that is partly determined by the rules but through which players express their individuality. The analogy to reading is obvious, and Guerra recognizes that the freedom to play or read is relative by comparing individual games and books. It’s a neat idea, even if it is needlessly complicated by the way Guerra tells it.

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Analogy · Art · Clothing · Epistemology · Etiquette · Linguistics · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Reading (process) · Social science · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies