Dr. Sean Matharoo, The Noise of Paidia: A Playful Reading of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx

In “The Noise of Paidia: A Playful Reading of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx”, Dr. Matharoo will offer a playful reading of French Oulipo novelist Anne Garréta’s Sphinx (2015), which removes gendered grammar to play with the question of desire. He will return to French anthropologist Roger Caillois’s study of games Les jeux et les hommes (1958), focusing on the improvisational principle he names “paidia” as it emerges in Garréta’s novel. Matharoo will then explain the paidia of Sphinx through a detour through the question of noise, which could be understood vis-à-vis Denise Ferreira da Silva as the loss of signification. He aims to demonstrate that Garréta’s novel provides a way to generate meaning without recourse to usefulness.