Joe Moshenska

Iconoclasm as Child's Play

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Taking its impetus from remarkable fact that holy things were given to children as toys in the early modern period as a way of destroying their power, this book rethinks the meaning of both iconoclasm and child's play then and now.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. April 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 237mm x 162mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 570g
• ISBN-13: 9780804798501
• ISBN-10: 0804798508
• Artikelnr.: 53544160

Autorenporträt

Joe Moshenska is Associate Professor of English, University of Oxford, and Tutorial Fellow of University College.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Preface: Preface
chapter abstract
The preface begins with a sermon by Roger Edgeworth, delivered in the West
of England in the 1530s, that describes children playing with objects
removed from monasteries. The children are interrupted by their parents,
who insist that these objects be denounced as "idols." Drawing on
discussions from art history and political theory, it suggests that this
scene is emblematic of the way in which the closed world of child's play
seems both to demand and to resist interpretation. It distinguishes the
delicate interpretative balance of the scene from some more recent attempts
to see play either as entirely open and free or as entirely closed and
predetermined, and sketches out the overall trajectory of the book.
Introduction: Introduction
chapter abstract
The introduction traces the wider historical and theoretical narratives in
which iconoclasm and child's play have played prominent-but typically
opposed-roles. It begins with Baudelaire's association of parents who deny
toys to their children with Protestantism, and shows that this is
symptomatic of a widely postulated opposition between play and the
Reformation, linked to the identification of violently iconoclastic
disenchantment as the essence of modernity. It then explores the roles that
iconoclasm and play assumed in the emergence of modern aesthetics from
Schiller to Gadamer, and the prominence of toys in modern accounts of
materiality. These discussions set up the larger narratives of iconoclasm
and play against which the texture of iconoclastic child's play itself is
tested in the chapters that follow.
1Trifle
chapter abstract
This chapter begins with lists compiled in Lincolnshire in the 1550s. These
lists show that objects including pyxes-containers for the Eucharist-were
given to children as playthings. The chapter links this practice to the
widespread discourse that sought to demean traditional religion as a mere
trifling with inane and worthless things, but it argues that the practice
of iconoclastic child's play differs from this polemic in that the object
actually lingers as a potential locus for newly emerging meanings. This
possibility is linked to the wider complexities surrounding the status of
trifles and inanities in the history of Christian thought and its
consistent inversions of value, as well as to the self-reflexive
interrogation of the status of trifles in the writings of Thomas More.
2Doll
chapter abstract
This chapter opens with a father in Cologne in the 1590s who snapped the
arms from a crucifix and gave it to his children as a toy. Returning to the
sermon by Edgeworth discussed in the preface, the chapter considers this
broken object as what Edgeworth calls an "idoll"-a hybridization of doll
and idoll. This possibility is linked to the wider presence of "holy dolls"
in medieval Christianity, but ultimately the doll is explored not as a
stable and readily identifiable category but as a way of conceiving of
ambiguous objects that may be more or less human at different moments and
subjected alternatingly to violence and care. The implications of this
possibility are explored in relation to a medieval Christ child, a broken
crucifix, and a contemporary representation of a shattered doll.
3Puppet
chapter abstract
This chapter opens with a movable image of a dove, representing the Holy
Spirit, that was made into a plaything in sixteenth century Germany. It
relates this specific object to a wider range of articulated and jointed
figures involved in late medieval piety that were often attacked as empty
puppets by reformers. It uses these objects to think not about puppets per
se but rather about the jointedness or constitutive brokenness of holy
things more broadly, particularly relics poised between the sacred and the
disgusting. These objects are related to the unstable place of playfulness
and the material in Erasmus's writings, and to the wider place of creative
breaking and the disgusting in modern art.
4Fetish
chapter abstract
This chapter opens with an ambiguous set of objects collected by a Dutch
woman named Margrieta van Varick and described as "Indian Babies," possibly
brought with her from the Dutch East Indies to New England, and relates
them to the practice of iconoclastic child's play in Malaysia. It
repositions iconoclastic child's play in a fraught colonial context and
asks how the play of other cultures is to be interpreted. Beginning with
ethnographic and psychoanalytic discussions of child's play by
Lévi-Strauss, Winnicott, and others, it then moves to consider the category
of the fetish as one that has long been intertwined with the status of
children and their playing. It uses the contested status of this
category-as an object both replete with, and devoid of, meaning-to
reconsider the fetish as plaything both in sixteenth-century Guinea and in
Adorno's writing on artworks and children's games.
5Play
chapter abstract
This chapter opens with a set of medieval wooden statues in Audley End
House in Essex that survived in part because they spent a period being used
by children as toys. It considers the uneven trajectories through which
these objects have passed-existing at different points as holy things,
playthings, and art-things-to consider the wider temporal narratives into
which play (and especially the playing of children) is often folded. It
considers the way in which educative and habituating schemes from Plato to
Renaissance figures such as Thomas Elyot and Montaigne involve the
interpretation of play as a linear process of habituation, but it argues
that these narratives involve a defensive simplification of the way in
which play can in fact unfold in and through time, an attempt to limit and
tame its meanings.
6Mask
chapter abstract
This chapter begins with a wooden doll from the seventeenth century that is
juxtaposed with the statues from Audley End considered in the previous
chapter on the basis of their equally fixed, impassive visages. This
feature is used to consider the way in which children, especially when at
play, have been seen as troublingly masked, inscrutable, alien beings. It
discusses accounts from the sixteenth century, notably John Harington's,
that recognize in play periods of vacant, blank, neutral time. It then
proceeds to an extended reading of Bruegel's painting Children's Games, and
especially a consideration of the reading of this work by the Nazi art
historian Hans Sedlmayr. This painting, and Sedlmayr's remarkable and
deeply disquieting account, are seen as encapsulating the ways in which
child's play's resistance to interpretation can provoke fear and horror-a
possibility linked to the periodic association of children with witchcraft
and demonic possession.
Conclusion: Toy
chapter abstract
The conclusion returns to the larger narratives into which play has often
been folded in order to reconsider them in relation to the complexities of
iconoclastic child's play. It suggests that neat temporalities in which
play and seriousness contrast and alternate with one another need to be
replaced with trajectories that have room for sudden alteration and
reversal. Drawing in part from the writings of Hans Blumenberg, Bruno
Latour, Michel Serres, Siegfried Kracauer, and Igor Kopytoff, it suggests
that we think of objects (including artworks) in terms of their "toy
potential"-the perennial possibility that an object might both come to be,
and cease to be, a plaything. The implications of this possibility are
illustrated via a reading of an episode from Spenser's Faerie Queene in
which a malevolent allegorical dragon is startlingly transformed into a
child's plaything.