The Phenomenon of the Game in the Works of Christian Kracht

This paper explores the phenomenon of play in the novel by Christian Kracht “Faserland”. The concept of play is considered to be overused with regard to postmodern works, be they literary texts, films or paintings. Virtually every literary theorist has at least once highlighted “playfulness” with respect to distinctive features of postmodern literature (Lihina, 1997; Janetzki, Rath, 1992). Nonetheless, which techniques of postmodern literature can be defined with the help of play remains unclear. Thus, this paper is aimed at devising transparent principles of description of the category of play within a postmodernism literary text. In order to formulate these guidelines, we will use multimethod research design. Firstly, referring to the conception of play proposed by Huizinga (1997) we set ourselves an objective to prove that a literary text represents a game space. Then we intend to analyse such concepts of postmodern literature as deconstruction, intertextuality, reader as co-author, double-coding, etc. as mechanisms underlying a play-related activity between the author and the reader. As a result, the theoretical matrix received will be applied to the analysis of the aforesaid novel. This study will contribute to the body of research on both the phenomenon of play in postmodern literature and Christian Kracht’s prose.