Scholarship
Book
Reading Games: A Philosophical Examination of Play in Literature
A study of Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, and Georges Perec
It was the historian Johan Huizinga who first elaborated a theory of play. Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roger Caillois and other luminaries have also been drawn to the subject. Now, Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja has applied play-theory to the words of three authors — Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett and Georges Perec — with illuminating, sometimes startling results.
— Anthony Cronin
Praise
"Reading Games is a subtle, provocative, intellectually invigorating study of the ludic impulse in literature. Thoughtful, carefully researched, and mobile in its strategy, this book argues for a reconfigured vision of literature, one based on an ethics of writerly and readerly gesture…The kind of play that Reading Games describes is both free and uncorrupted; it is refreshingly dialogical, clearing away a site for interaction and articulation within the text; most importantly perhaps, it encourages us to 'see otherly.'"
— Warren Motte
"We all know there's more to games than fun. Bohman-Kalaja's remarkable study of O'Brien, Beckett and Perec is the first to get to grips with the deeper issues involved of the ludic practices of these post-modern masters. It also teaches us a great deal about what kind of games can be played with and through words. Learned, illuminating, original and profound, this is a study that should transform the teaching of modern literature – and bring back some of the fun!"
— David Bellos
Selected Work
Interview with Medbh McGuckian
Borders or Frontiers? McGuckian's Unconscious Realm (Essay)
The Shooter (Play)
Undoing Identities in Two Plays by George Bernard Shaw (Essay)
The truth is an odd number: At swim-two-birds (Essay)
Playing the Spectator While Waiting for Godot (Essay)