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Critical Play: An Introduction

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Reading and Writing Experimental Texts

Abstract

The Introduction, “Critical Play,” is staged as a conversation between the editors; in dialogic form, weaving personal narrative with scholarship, we provide the project’s backstory and situate the book within a broader history of innovative and/or personal criticism. The play also establishes the primary questions that Critical Innovations poses, and characterizes the incredibly varied and fluid responses from its contributors. Given the subject matter of the book, we believe it is imperative to begin to model alternate critical methods from the beginning; our particular approach, blocked as a three-act play with changing scenes, allows us to confront head-on the central issue of polyphony as well as the institutional politics surrounding the production of innovative criticism.

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Quynn, K., Silbergleid, R. (2017). Critical Play: An Introduction. In: Silbergleid, R., Quynn, K. (eds) Reading and Writing Experimental Texts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58362-4_1

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