초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Inspired by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s discussion in Truth and Method (1960), this paper examines one of the significant themes in play such as the motion of thought and the possibility of thought about a motion from the perspective of narrative. As shown in a Rilke’s poem that Gadamer uses for the epigraph in his book, the freedom of one’s body and consciousness is the essence of one’s play with the other companion. Only the author’s observation of this motion can lend the play its own narrative significance. In this essay, I compare Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go (1951) and David Foster Wallace’s String Theory (2016), which are based on the games of Go and tennis, respectively, in order to determine the relationship between body and thought and how it is represented in those narratives. If contemplating the creative move(ments) of a ‘genius’ or ‘master’ and its “perfect game” is, as one critic puts it, “not just for writers but for philosophers too,” then our critical reading of these texts would also work as a philosophical thinking for the play and the narrative, which cannot but lead to the observation that there is a human movement at its core, a movement of body and mind in tandem. The purpose of this paper, which is an attempt at a meta-critique of play criticism, is to identify and reinterpret the ultimate meaning of the play that the observer-critic endeavors to establish.
