JEUX explores the ways in which salon activities, such as literary games, contributed to novelists’ creative practices and theoretical explorations. Games work differently from narrative, especially in a long-form text like the novel. How do games and narrative go together in Charlotte-Rose Caumont de la Force’s Les Jeux d’esprit (1701)? Her salon company engages in a series of literary games across multiple days until, on the final day, they play the “game of the novel” (“le jeu du roman”). In her talk, Kukkonen discusses how literary games around shorter forms, such as the “dream”, the “pensée” or the “metamorphosis”, are taken up, transformed and integrated in the longer narrative game of the novel at the end of La Force’s text. La Force thereby provides, Kukkonen suggests, an important theoretical contribution to the poetics of the Early-Modern novel.
The presentation is part of the panel “Game as Narrative / Narrative as Game in the Early-Modern Period” chaired by Enrica Zanin. In the panel, Karin Kukkonen, Guiomar Hautcoeur, and Natália Pikli investigate the links between game-play and narrative practices in the Early Modern period through examples from England, Spain and France.
The session includes a gaming workshop where Hannah Freundlich and Karin Kukkonen lead gameplay in literary games selected by the panel speakers.