Conclusion: Toy

Abstract

The conclusion returns to the larger narratives into which play has often been folded in order to reconsider them in relation to the complexities of iconoclastic child’s play. It suggests that neat temporalities in which play and seriousness contrast and alternate with one another need to be replaced with trajectories that have room for sudden alteration and reversal. Drawing in part from the writings of Hans Blumenberg, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, Siegfried Kracauer, and Igor Kopytoff, it suggests that we think of objects (including artworks) in terms of their “toy potential”--the perennial possibility that an object might both come to be, and cease to be, a plaything. The implications of this possibility are illustrated via a reading of an episode from Spenser’s Faerie Queene in which a malevolent allegorical dragon is startlingly transformed into a child’s plaything.