Abstract

Spariosu, a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia, is really a philosopher of culture. In this book, in his earlier Literature, Mimesis, and Play: Essays in Literary Theory, and in different articles, he outlines a theory influenced by Eric Havelock, E. R. Dodds, Werner Jaeger, and Rene Girard, but which in fact is quite original. The author argues in the first half of his book that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Western culture accommodates two opposing concepts of play. The first, the aesthetically moderated view of Kant and Schiller, is more rational and mediated. While this model of play is a reaction against the repression of the play instinct by the rationalist and post-Aristotelian tradition, it stops short of a full return to Dionysus. According to Spariosu this type of moderation merely intends to provide some flexibility to the empirical-rationalist mainstream of Western thought and to enrich it.