Playing Seriously

book reviews sibility (93). Misused prepositions include "between" for among (50), "impose to" for on (146), "move onto" for on to (34), "helplessness from" for against (76). Proofreading is poor; the style is heavy. The book's chief merit is investigative thoroughness, depth of research. Poems are correlated to diary entries and letters, and further clarified by comparisons with statements in works by the poets' doctors . We understand each man's vital concerns and many of his mental strategies. The study holds deep human and aesthetic interest. Yeats was wrong to keep Owen out of his 1936 Oxford Book of English Verse as a "passive" sufferer. All three poets worked with urgency to find meaning in their complex visions. MARTIN BlDNEY __________________ Binghamton University Playing Seriously Paul B. Armstrong. Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. xv + 207 pp. $39.95 PLAYAND THE POLITICS OF READING is an important book in more than one sense. It is, first and foremost, a welcome corrective to currently trendy modes of politically engaged readings that have, contrary to their emancipatory and subversive claims, generated a new orthodoxy and spawned endless drearily similar readings, all regurgitating the very same formulations, "unmasking" the underlying prejudices and oppressive mechanisms of canonical texts. These readings not only tend to produce severely reductive discussions of literature, but also—more seriously, perhaps—fail to do justice to the seriousness of the very political, ideological and cultural issues which they claim to address. The major accomplishment oÃ- Play and the Politics of Reading is in its serious engagement with both literature and politics in the broadest sense. The task set by Armstrong for politics is both ambitious and modest : "to create forms of community that allow us to negotiate our differences without assuming a prior common ground or an ultimately attainable consensus." His conception of the reading process is aimed to "stage, model, and habituate" the form of communication required for this task. Armstrong makes a case for this "nonconsensual reciprocity " by engaging with Sartre's political theory of reading in What is Literature?, setting the foundations of his own position on the work of Habermas, Lyotard (and their seminal debate), and neoliberal thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Richard Dworkin, and Judith Shklar. 353 ELT 49 : 3 2006 Reading, Armstrong argües, can be practiced in such a way as to stage a kind of nonconsensual but reciprocal interaction which can then serve as a model for other social interactions. What he proposes is neither a "conservative reverence of canonical authority" nor a "radical unmasking of textual false consciousness," but a form of engagement that involves a reciprocal recognition of radical otherness, and an ironic recognition of the contingency of one's own convictions and conceptions , on which one must nevertheless act. This apparent paradox is actually inherent in the act of reading: a process of projection, reconfiguration , and engagement with other worlds that challenges and relativizes the reader's assumptions and prejudices. Drawing on the social implication of Iser's aesthetic theory and particularly on the idea of "play" with its "doubling" effect, Armstrong makes a strong case for the inseparability of ethics from aesthetics, taking the modernist novel as a case in point. Contrary to both the traditional view of modernism as exclusively concerned with subjective perception and therefore apolitical, he argues that the modernist novel, which ostensibly turns away from a representation of the social world in terms of its themes and contents, generates a redefinition of the politics of fiction through its formal structures, narrative strategies , and unresolvable ambiguities, and thus calls for a different, ethically engaged mode of reading. This essentially political stance of modernism—poised between the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century ideological, cultural and aesthetic paradigms—is determined "by the way in which problems of power and authority are staged for the recipient. The very experience of responding to the narrative experiments characteristic of modern fiction confronts the reader with issues about the reconcilability of perspectives , the authority of ways of seeing, or the contingency of commitments —issues that may have wide-ranging social implications even when the explicit subject matter of the...