Abstract

This dissertation addresses the rhetorical significance of "free play" in post-Kantian aesthetics and literary criticism, providing an historical account of the paradoxical relation between "play" and "work" in professional philosophy and literary criticism since the late eighteenth century. ;In Chapter One, I situate the contemporary appeal of "free play" in the rhetoric of its founding text, Kant's Critique of Judgement, arguing that Kant's introduction of the notion of the "free play" of the cognitive faculties in aesthetic experience marks the intersection of "middle-class" and "aristocratic" interests in the texts of the economically-vulnerable professional philosopher in late eighteenth-century Prussia. ;Tracing the rhetorical transformation of "free play" in Schiller's "mis-reading" of Kant, Chapter Two focuses on Schiller's notion of the "play-drive" as a translation of Kant's moral imperative into a bourgeois "aesthetic imperative." Addressing Schiller's use of paradox as rhetorical form in Aesthetic Letters, I argue that Schiller's strategy throughout involves an elision of discursive practices--so-called "ordinary" language and philosophical language--in an attempt to consolidate notions of freedom around the aesthetic concept of "play" as the rhetorical inverse of bourgeois "labor." ;In Chapter Three, I turn to the repression of "free play" in the birth of professional literary criticism in early nineteenth-century England, focusing specifically on the criticism of Coleridge, Arnold, and Richards. Locating the missing notion of "play" in Coleridge's precarious economic position in the second decade of the nineteenth century, I trace the censorship of "free play" in other British "borrowings" from German Idealism to the latent economic interests of early "professional" literary critics like Arnold and Richards. ;Chapter Four addresses the resurgence of "play" in the highly polemical criticism of Huizinga, Gadamer, and Derrida, locating the varying "politics" of each in the ambiguity of "play" since Kant. Focusing on the apparent contradiction between the "play" of Gadamerian hermeneutics and "free play" of Derridean deconstruction, I map out the inherent tension between movement and structure that characterizes all modern theory of play, underscoring the rhetorical appeal of all attempts to situate the "work" of professional philosophy under the rubic of "play."