John Sharples

A cultural history of chess-players (eBook, ePUB)

Minds, machines, and monsters

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

This inquiry concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea that the chess-player has become a fragmented collection of images, underpinned by challenges to, and confirmations of, chess's status as an intellectually-superior and socially-useful game, particularly since the medieval period. Yet, the chess-player is an understudied figure. No previous work has shone a light on the chess-player itself. Increasingly, chess-histories have retreated into tidy consensus. This work aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity. To this end, this book, utilising a wide range of sources, including newspapers, periodicals, detective novels, science-fiction, and comic-books, is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to themes of mind, machine, and monster.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Kind World Publishing
• Seitenzahl: 232
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. August 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781526120557
• Artikelnr.: 55006743

Autorenporträt

John Sharples is an independent historian

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: 'Of magic look and meaning': themes concerning the cultural chess
player Part I: Minds 1 Sinner, melancholic, and animal: three lives of the chess
player in medieval and early
modern literature 2 'A quiet game of chess?': respectability in urban and literary space 3 Elementary: the chess
player and literary
detective Part II: Machines 4 Future shocks: IBM's Deep Blue and the Automaton Chess
Player, 1997
1769 5 A haunted mind: Kasparov and the machines 6 'Everything was black': locating monstrosity in representations of the Automaton Chess
Player Part III: Monsters 7 Red, black, white, and blue: American monsters 8 Performance notes: absence and presence in Reykjavik, Iceland, 1972 9 Kapow!: the chess
player in comic
books, 1940
53 Epilogue: exploding heads and the death of the chess
player Index