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italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies Dear all, we invite papers for a graduate student conference on play in the Italian tradition to be held at Harvard University on April 7-8, 2017. "(Ex)pressing Play" Harvard–Brown Chiasmi Conference of Italian Studies Harvard University April 7-8, 2017 Keynote Speaker: Professor Marco Arnaudo (Indiana University Bloomington) The relevance of play to questions of cultural formation and maintenance has been observed by several critics. Johan Huizinga in* Homo Ludens* argues that the concept of play lies at the bottom of any operation of human society. Within that argument, Huizinga assigns a fundamental affinity between play and order, writing that play “creates order, is order” and reasoning that play’s aesthetic drive toward beauty leads to the creation of orderly form. John Dewey in *Art as Experience *observes a similar process in play by children, which, in his view, involves the ordering of activities and materials toward a creative end. While this conference is interested in the order of play – its forms, rules, and limits – it is also motivated by a desire to understand how play disrupts any prevailing sense of order, in a manner similar to that observed by Bakhtin on the transgressive and comic aspects of the carnivalesque. How is playfulness in Italian literature and culture used to signal inventiveness? How does it lay claim to new thought? And how oes it, in turn, invite the audience to put their minds “in play”? This conference aims to explore the rich vein of play and playfulness, not solely in literature, but in other creative forms born from and informing Italian culture, such as music, theater, games, sport, media, and technology. Play has enduring and varied connections to Italian literature and culture: the atteggiamento del gioco assumed by authors such as Boccaccio and Calvino, the linguistic experimentalism of the neoavanguardia, the conventional or radical interactions between poetry and music in Renaissance madrigalisms, and even the Montessori method. We welcome contributions that engage with the topic of play in the Italian tradition from students working in a wide range of disciplines and using varying methodologies. Topics may include, but are not limited to: · Portrayals of historical and contemporary sport · Uses of narrative and history in board games and video games · Pedagogical strategies of guided play · Instances of wordplay, rebuses, or creative substitution in literary texts · Verbal or pictorial manipulations as memory aiding devices · Innovation, contention, or humor in musical texts · Representations of the ludic or the carnivalesque in the visual arts Presentations are not to exceed 20 minutes and may be given in either Italian or English. Please send abstracts of 250 words as a .doc file to *[log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>* by 15 January 2017. The title of the paper and the name, affiliation, and e-mail address of the presenter should appear on a cover sheet, as well as any requests for technical equipment. We look forward to hearing from you. Best, Amelia Linsky and Luca Politi (Harvard University) ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: subscribe italian-studies YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: unsubscribe italian-studies to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/italian-studies