Xi Xi's Playful Image-Texts: Ekphrasis, Parergon, and the Concept of Toy

Abstract

What does the ludic have to do with Xi Xi’s writings and creative concerns? Since Jacques Ehrmann’s Game, Play, Literature (1968) and Warren Motte’s Playtexts (1995), critical discussions about play have expanded significantly beyond video game studies and child pedagogy to literature and aesthetics. Critics such as Espen Aarseth and Astrid Ensslin (2014) focus on how the reader becomes a player and argue for the importance of “ergodicity”, or “non-trivial” (Aarseth 1997: 1) effort that ludic literature demands from readers; Katherine Hayles (2007) discusses how intermediation in digital literature creates ludic effects in the dynamic switching between different interfaces and media; whereas Mihai Spariosu (1997: xv) identifies playful literary discourse as a “liminal mode of being”. These studies highlight text-reader interactivity and play as a destabilizing and self-justifying movement at work in literature and aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, they have – as well as most discussions of literary ludicity – focused on literature produced in Europe and North America. This essay thus aims to contribute to existing criticism by exploring how Xi Xi’s works offer us new articulations of play.