The project JEUX – Literary Games, Poetics and the Early-Modern Novel researches gameplay practiced in the salons of seventeenth-century Paris and its impact on the developing genre of the novel. JEUX draws on textual representations of gameplay in novels, on archival materials documenting gameplay and on handbooks for literary games in order to map out how the practice of early-modern literary games shaped the modern novel. Investigating these materials allows us to draw inferences about how gameplay, still today a major catalyst of creativity, helped early novelists explore the possibilities of the novel as a genre when it comes to its storyworlds, its formal coherence and plot, as well as to the process of its narration. When novelists represent gameplay and have their characters discuss the rules, these practices also constitute a new source for understanding how these writers theorised their own creative work and developed a poetics for the novel.
JEUX investigates the impact of early-modern literary games on the developing form, poetics and history of the novel in the seventeenth century. The project draws on a range of methods from narratology, cognitive approaches to literature, material history, game studies, and digital humanities.
We have reconstructed a series of literary games from 1701 and played these games with today’s writers, creating a rich repository of observed gameplay, reflections from the players and their written work inspired by the games, which stands to innovate research in literary history by approaching texts through the practices that stand behind them. The datasets provide a unique opportunity for the project to study the processes behind spontaneous storytelling, collective creative practices, and the potential of games for enabling creativity in social and educational contexts. The workshops themselves were organised as an anthropological experiment, where we look at the variation in creative practices through the epistemic framework of the social-science experiment, reflecting on how the rules of pre-registration, data collection and analysis might be turned into productive, enabling game rules also for practices that are designed to lead to the unexpected, such as games.
JEUX revisits the history of the novel through the game practices of the salons, and works to re-ignite the creative potential of these games for moving across disciplinary boundaries.
