Thesis Abstract by John Sharples
This thesis examines cultural representations of chess and the chess-player from the early-modern... more This thesis examines cultural representations of chess and the chess-player from the early-modern period to the twentieth century, beginning with the earliest English-language chess-instructional manuals, through L'Encyclopédie's 1755 entry on the game, and ending with the defeat of the then-World-Chess-Champion Garry Kasparov by IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997. The study of chess and the chess-player has been a much neglected area of enquiry among cultural historians. Accounts such as Harold Murray's 1913 History of Chess, ably supplemented by Richard Eales' and Harry Golombek's works have presented the chronological, social history of the game and its global colonisation, whilst paying less attention to the impact of changes in practice and performance on the game's representation. Utilising newspapers, periodicals, chess manuals, cartoons, super-hero comics, film, fiction and ephemera, this thesis maps an alternative history of the game, bringing its more nightmarish undercurrent to the surface. In assessing the game's representations it foregrounds four key events in the cultural history of chess -the emergence of 'modern' chess in the mid-nineteenth century; the début of the Automaton Chess-Player in 1769; the victory of IBM's Deep Blue in 1997; and the emergence of Bobby Fischer in the 1950s as a public figure. In addition, it examines detective fiction, science fiction and monster fiction, uncovering how ideas surrounding the themes of mind, machine and monster within these genres shaped representations of chess and chess-player. My thesis' primary contribution to knowledge is the identification and analytical use of the myriad forms and functions of the cultural figure of the chess-player. By employing 'monster theory,' detailed by J.J. Cohen and Asa Simon Mittman, as a starting point to frame the question 'what is a chess-player?', it questions how the figure performed specific roles in relation to the chess-player's reputation as intellectually superior and, as an often surprisingly disruptive spectacle, on the boundary of respectability and civility. Emphasising the social or intellectual distance at which the chess-player was usually experienced at, either through the printed page or in socially delineated spaces, the chess-player can be shown as monstrous by being 'mis-known'unrecognised and misunderstood -and their intellectual, emotional and moral characteristics exaggerated or distorted. By further considering the aesthetics of chess-play as a spectacle, representations of the game can be seen as bound up with a specific 'way of seeing,' which I examine through a consideration of the cultural and textual spaces of the nineteenth-century Café de la Régence, sites of competition involving non-human chess-players, and the homes of chessplayers such as Bobby Fischer. Each of these spaces was constructed as a space of otherness and alterity, a haunted space echoing the images of their occupants. Representations of game and player questioned the supposedly respectable nature of the chess-player, constituted strategies of resistance towards new technology, or, as pseudo-'colonial' texts, defined chess as a mental horizon, objectifying its subjects, whilst denying them agency. Considering the question 'what is a chess-player?' this thesis demonstrates that the figure was an unstable, contested figure -a kaleidoscopic image of society.
Books by John Sharples
This study concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea th... more This study concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea that the chess-player has become a fragmented collection of images. The formation of these images has been underpinned by challenges to, and confirmations of, chess s status as an intellectually-superior and socially-useful game, particularly since rule changes five centuries ago. Yet, the chess-player is an understudied figure, whose many faces have frequently been obscured. No previous work has shone a light on the chess-player itself. Increasingly, chess-histories have retreated into tidy consensus. This work takes aim at the kaleidoscopic chess-player. It aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity, one looking forwards and backwards, lurking out of reach at the heart of modernity. To this end, this book, utilising a wide range of sources, including newspapers, periodicals, detective novels, science-fiction, and comic-books, is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject whose identity is used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to themes of mind, machine, and monster. Covering a wide variety of locations and individuals including Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov, the Automaton Chess-Player, and moving from Victorian Paris to the neo-Gothic castles of twenty-first-century New York, this work is aimed at students and researchers in the fields of cultural history, leisure and sport, and monster theory, as well as those interested in the intersection between human and machine.
Papers by John Sharples
Sport in History, 2021
This article examines nineteenth-century chessplayer and writer George Walker's essay 'Anatomy of... more This article examines nineteenth-century chessplayer and writer George Walker's essay 'Anatomy of the Chess Automaton' (1839). Walker's writing frequently highlighted how spaces of urban modernity co-existed uneasily with historical memories. His tendency to highlight disreputable scenarios regarding chess-play can be set against a narrative which suggests chess-play became respectable in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Unusually for Walker, however, his 'Anatomy of the Chess Automaton' demonstrates a desire to close off meaning and complexity, to diminish the potential for disreputable acts, whilst existing at odds with the historical context in which he wrote. This cultural mode in which Walker operated in can be viewed through the conceptual frameworks of curiosity (following Barbara M. Benedict) and respectability (following Mike Huggins) which highlight ideas of regulation, consumption, performance, transgression, and ambition. This article employs the frameworks of curiosity and respectability to interrogate related leisure and sporting practices in relation to the Automaton ChessPlayer which existed outside the regular boundaries of society. It continues research previously published in Sport in History and elsewhere on the nature of chess-play and chess-spectacle as a disreputable spectacle. Ultimately, I show how both Walker and the object of his essay were curiosities themselves, engaging in an infinite game which produced a jumble of meanings.
Fantastika Journal, 2020
Lindsay Hallam’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (2018) appears at a moment of increasing literary ... more Lindsay Hallam’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (2018) appears at a moment of increasing literary and academic interest in the Twin Peaks world. Franck Boulègue’s Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic (2017); David Bushman and Arthur Smith’s Twin Peaks FAQ (2016); and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Catherine Spooner’s edited collection Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television (2016) have provided fresh insight and approaches to the world of damn fine coffee and ontologically uncertain owls. Accompanying this has been a resurgence of theoretical interest in the Horror genre, including Xavier Aldana Reyes’s Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership (2016), suggesting renewed approaches to works of genre cinema. Applying such approaches is the aim of the Devil’s Advocates series, published by Auteur Publishing. Previous efforts include The Blair Witch Project (2017) by Peter Turner, Don’t Look Now (2017) by Jessica Gildersleeve, and Macbeth (2017) by Rebekah Owens. Critically-minded without descending inescapably into the mountains of theory, the “fresh perspectives” of the series have been praised by Christian Fowler who also suggests the series “will perfectly complement the BFI archive volumes” (Hallam, 1). Hallam combines, analyses, and extends academic and journalistic commentary in their examination of David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me (1992), utilising modern theoretical tools which have developed or come-into-being since the film’s release, particularly affect theory, employing these on “the ways in which human bodies are affected by those on the screen on three levels: representationally, emotionally and somatically”
Victorian Periodicals Review, 2019
Tim Harding's British Chess Literature to 1914: A Handbook for Historians coincides with increase... more Tim Harding's British Chess Literature to 1914: A Handbook for Historians coincides with increased interest in sport history and its intersections with print and urban networks. Focusing on chess literature published in Britain and Ireland from the 1810s to 1914, the work addresses an audience of researchers and chess enthusiasts seeking insight into the game's literary entanglements. Harding discusses chess columns in the first four chapters, and a valuable appendix summarises all such columns published in the period. Later chapters examine chess magazines, periodicals, books, and archival information, and further appendices correct standard reference works on chess. British Chess Literature to 1914 extends the author's recent research, which includes the monograph Joseph Henry Blackburne (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015) and an intriguing collection of capsule biographies entitled Eminent Victorian Chess Players (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012).
Fantastika Journal, 2019
This article investigates the intersection between modernity and Science Fiction in postwar US cu... more This article investigates the intersection between modernity and Science Fiction in postwar US culture. Focusing on the visual symbols of the flying saucer, the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb, and the Soviet satellite Sputnik, it approaches these new shapes in the sky through the sound impressions they made. In this manner, the article is part of my broader research regarding the sensory cultural history of the time, considering the way specific sense impressions – sight, sound, smell, taste, touch – were used to varying degrees to construct identity and meaning at a time of scientific innovation and new possibilities. Expanding the scope of analysis beyond visual culture and printed culture revives and reanimates historical events, lifting them from the two-dimensional page or screen into the realm of lived, everyday experience. Embracing the novelty of newly domesticated audiovisual technologies including television and radio broadcasts, as well as sounds heard on the street, such as warning sirens or the bleeps of passing satellites, allows one to listen in on the past, adding a new dimension to understandings of the era. The intent here is not to negate the importance that visual sensory impressions played in the construction of identity but rather to suggest that excessive focus on these elements can obscure a number of other messages, of alternative micro-histories, and suggest that the cultural identities of the flying saucer, mushroom cloud, and Sputnik were in no way ‘natural,’ but arose from a shaping of visual sense impressions which was both considered and careless.
Fantastika Journal, 2018
To return is to come or to go back, to turn around, to give back, or restore. A return is an act ... more To return is to come or to go back, to turn around, to give back, or restore. A return is an act of coming back, or a thing sent back. There is an implication of repetition. But can something really come back? Is it possible to restore a previous state? Do all things remain unchanged? Do superficially similar situations not contain underlying differences? Stepping into this etymological and philosophical whirlpool, the recent television event Twin Peaks: The Return demonstrates the difficulty of return, the illusion of progress, and the tensions between surface appearance and inner life.
Sport in History, 2018
This article aims to contextualise the nineteenth-century chess-player and writer George Walker’s... more This article aims to contextualise the nineteenth-century chess-player and writer George Walker’s involvement within urban and literary culture. Continuing research published in two recent Sport in History articles concerning Walker’s essays on the chess-player in Victorian Paris, this article considers another side to the chess-player’s cultural image in a different urban setting within Walker’s historical-fiction ‘A Night in York – A Chess Adventure of 1842’, in which the author imagines a night-time meeting with a ghostly medieval chess-player. George Walker’s life was marked by an involvement within the sites of nineteenth-century literary and urban chess-play. One notable feature of Walker’s writing was his constant return to the history of the game and its influence on the present day. Indeed, the interplay between chess past and chess present has been seen as a problematic aspect of his literary output. This article considers this theme and contends that Walker’s regard for the past should be seen within the context of modernity and an attempt to recover and pay sufficient attention to the historic game before its traces and fragments disappeared forever, while acknowledging the futility of the effort.
Fantastika, 2017
This article investigates post-war flying saucer narratives within US popular culture. After the ... more This article investigates post-war flying saucer narratives within US popular culture. After the initial sighting by Kenneth Arnold in July 1947 which triggered the phenomenon, the flying saucer began appearing in a variety of media and material forms directed at numerous audiences. Newspaper reports, films, toys, and novels utilised this new cultural form. The flying saucer narrative, its beginnings, public response, and domestication, are considered as a whole and through an individual text. In particular, this article will consider Lucrece Hudgins Beale’s 1954 children’s story Santa and the Mars King – perhaps the earliest intersection of flying saucers and Santa Claus. Santa and the Mars King was one of the annual children’s stories Beale wrote between 1942 and 1968. These stories were serialised and syndicated by the Associated Press to member newspapers, beginning with Santa and the Skeptic and ending with Santa and the Hippies. Each involved a topical theme, presenting the concerns of the time comedically, but not entirely carelessly. Appearing ten years after Arnold’s 1947 sighting, Beale’s story reveals the way the saucer could become intertwined with other cultural mythologies of the age. Santa and the Mars King begins with a flying saucer sighting, a sceptical response from the public, and its investigation by the child protagonist, named Tom. Discovering that the saucers have disturbed local witches and Santa’s reindeer, threatening Christmas, Tom flies to Mars and attempts to save the day. Beale’s text highlights the malleability of the flying saucer myth, particularly the disconnection between visual identity and other signifiers; the way flying saucer narratives raised issues of belief and superstition; and the way cultural processes sought to contain and domesticate unfamiliar, uncanny elements.
Here you can find my little report on the Searching the Borders of Fantasy conferences
This paper considers post-human chess-players in Raymond Bernard’s silent film Le Jouer d’échecs ... more This paper considers post-human chess-players in Raymond Bernard’s silent film Le Jouer d’échecs (Henceforth LJdé) (1927) and the television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Henceforth T:TSCC) (2008-9). Each text presents an interpretation of the eighteenth-century Automaton Chess-Player, nicknamed the ‘Turk’, constructed by the Austro-Hungarian virtuoso Wolfgang von Kempelen and displayed initially at the court of the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa. Each presents its subject as the possessor of a monstrous identity which destabilises its immediate surroundings. Each presents an example of a past which has re-emerged. Each presents an uncanny hybrid of human and machine. Through the concept of displacement, three fragmented Gothic identities of the two Turks of LJdé and T:TSCC can be considered: the first concerns textual displacement, considering literary and textual transmission, historical trace, transformation, translation, and embellishment surrounding each text; the second concerns bodily displacement, or the way each Turk, although the product of human scientific and physical labour, transforms the categories of play and modernity into unfamiliar and strange spaces; and the third concerns displacement of power, specifically the violent encounters between the machines and regimes of spectacle and knowledge, and their relationship to traditional structures of the Family and Home. These aspects, comprising a small part of the two texts’ relationship to the Gothic as an ontological and epistemological strategy, demonstrate the nature and representation of Gothic subjects as the product of revelation and concealment, repetition and constant return.
To experience a story anew is a difficult task ...
George Walker's March 1840 article for Fraser's Magazine entitled 'Chess Without the Chess-Board'... more George Walker's March 1840 article for Fraser's Magazine entitled 'Chess Without the Chess-Board' attempted to outline the history and method of blindfold chess (or chess-play without sight of the board and pieces). Walker's article was written at a time when chess was becoming an increasingly visible part of nineteenth-century literary and urban culture, played within cafés and clubs and read about in middle-class literature such as Fraser's Magazine. Blindfold chess-play had historically raised issues surrounding spectacle, utility, and bodily and mental damage. Walker's essay can be seen in this context as well as his own body of work on the game, always concerned with historical circumstances and the possibility of expanding participation. This assessment of 'Chess Without the Chess-Board', as part of a wider research project on Walker's role within urban and literary modernity, follows work previously published in Sport in History on Walker's writings and complements research published in the author's monograph on the cultural chess-player. Prominent themes of Walker's on the blindfold chess player include the figure's multiple identities and the game’s ever-changing relationship to standards of respectability. Offering a lengthy 'how-to-play' to the beginning reader and outlining the national prestige and celebrity of historical blindfold chess-players, 'Chess Without the Chess Board' also presents a potentially disreputable reading of the blindfold chess player, denying the practice any wider social utility.
This essay investigates the relationship between the flying saucer within post-war American popul... more This essay investigates the relationship between the flying saucer within post-war American popular culture and narratives of home, technology, and authority. As an object embodying a specific cultural moment, the flying saucer became a nodal point, a discursive centre, where discussion of aesthetics, power and modernity came together, projected into the minds of Americans via print media, advertisements, songs and material culture. As an alternative focal point of post-war culture to the atomic bomb, blue suede shoes or Marilyn Monroe, the flying saucer was a bright light cast against darkening skies, revealing an American audience looking optimistically towards a utopian future and guardedly back at the massive destruction of twentieth-century global conflict. As a ‘monster,’ this symbol of modernity possessed a certain plasticity of identity, evoking variously and non-linearly feelings of fear and fascination, even playfulness. As an historical object, assessed in relation to technological and social change, the flying saucer eventually became thoroughly domesticated and acclimated within American society. Between Kenneth Arnold’s sighting which sparked national interest in the phenomenon on 24 June 1947 and the launch of Sputnik I on 4 October 1957, over 5000 flying saucer observations were reported to the United States Air Force (USAF). In 1950, five or six sightings per day were logged, before spiking in 1952, when more flying saucers were spotted ‘than at any time since the initial flood’ in 1947, totalling 1,700. Reports became more sporadic in 1953 when only 429 sightings were received, subsequently declining further to ‘hardly more than a trickle.’ Sputnik’s launch saw the flying saucer eclipsed to a degree as the generational other, taking its place within a genealogy of historical threats from above.
Sport in History, 2015
Between 1840 and 1851, amateur and professional chess became an increasingly prominent part of th... more Between 1840 and 1851, amateur and professional chess became an increasingly prominent part of the Victorian leisure world. A rapid rise in both literary output on the game and the number of places where it was played fortified the popular image of chess as rational and respectable. This paper challenges this image through close examination of the chess-player and writer George Walker's 1840 article The Café de la Régence. By considering Mike Huggins' challenge to the idea of a homogeneous Victorian middle-class respectability and taking up his implicit call to the historian of middle-class leisure to re-examine all leisure activities, particularly those that have, as the chess-player has until recently, evaded scholarly attention, this paper builds on revisionist challenges to the homogeneous respectability discourse. Providing an alternative reading of the chess-player as a potentially disreputable figure on display in the brightly-lit, notorious Parisian night, Walker depicts a loud, noisy, crowded, ill-mannered, sexist, and money-grabbing environment filled with passion and emotion, far removed from rational recreations that aimed at the individuals' improvement of health and physique, and personal, civic and national prestige.
Monsters and the Monstrous, 2014
Wolfgang von Kempelen's Automaton Chess-Player, first exhibited in 1769 in Vienna, has inspired a... more Wolfgang von Kempelen's Automaton Chess-Player, first exhibited in 1769 in Vienna, has inspired a large body of literature. Ken Whyld's Fake Automata in Chess (1994) lists 767 primary and secondary sources on the subject in myriad languages across a wide timespan, demonstrating the geographic scope of the Turk's movements, the impact it had in individual locations and on other inventors, the relevance it had for cultural commentary, and the challenge its presence provoked to perceived human intellectual superiority. Two texts concerning the automaton-Hannah Gould's Address to the Automaton Chess-Player and Reginald Bacchus and Ranger Gull's The Automaton (1900)-highlight the way von Kempelen's creation was represented in literature and constructed as a monstrous object. This article examines these two portrayals of the Automaton Chess-Player in terms of the concept of monster and distance, considering the nature of the monster as a spectacle, an ambiguous cultural fraud and an object which could provoke monstrous feeling in others, and the way intellectual, cultural, morphological, and geographic distance between the observer, or observers, and the Automaton Chess-Player influenced the form and manner of its cultural representation.
Ex Historia (University of Exeter Postgraduate Journal), 2011
History Studies (University of Limerick Postgraduate Journal), 2010
Conference Presentations by John Sharples
The atomic bomb, flying saucer, and Sputnik have been, in appearance or effect, comprehended and ... more The atomic bomb, flying saucer, and Sputnik have been, in appearance or effect, comprehended and recognised within culture through prominent visual imagery. That is, their identities have been performed through their visual aspects. Yet, the recognition of the silhouette of a mushroom cloud, the sleek shape of an alien craft, and the silver ball of the satellite, comes with a plurality of meanings, befitting of the possessors of monstrous identities, which can be assessed in terms of other senses. This article, moving beyond the solely visual component of cultural representation, examines the manufacture of the monstrous identities of bomb, saucer, and satellite, in terms of the relationship between visual images and the sound produced by and around each object. Examining sound broadly, within varying locational and social contexts, illuminates further aspects of each object’s signification, both reinforcing the iconic visual image and providing alternative perspectives. Sound and sound-events contributed to the articulation by each object of specific cultural anxieties concerning the arrival of modernity through technology, the persistence and security of conventional structures of nation and home, and the power of the United States in a post-war, post-Nagasaki, post-Hiroshima world. Invading the minds of Americans via material culture, read about in newspapers and magazines, seen at the drive-in, or heard in songs on the radio, each entered formerly safe domestic space, becoming a site where expert opinion and accepted hierarchies of power and authority were challenged. As bright lights against darkening skies, suggestive of illumination and immolation, the domestication through sound of each within American culture can be juxtaposed with the persistent monstrous status of each object, a monstrosity traditionally, but not exclusively, considered in visual terms.
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Thesis Abstract by John Sharples
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Conference Presentations by John Sharples