let's play shadowgraphs

A print-cut-and-play pack of 54 cards, each featuring one word taken from "Shadowgraphs" in Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or.

Comes with one of A.'s lost letters to his friend Vilhelm (B.), a set of instructions for four classic card games and one inspired by ghazal poetry, and an essay written by the author's sister about the piece.

This is a proof of concept for the author's PhD project. Its intention is to show how the philosophical and the literary meet in ways that go beyond reading novels -- whatever "reading" really means; and to demonstrate by example how both canon-critical and original works in philosophy can be done outside the confines of the now-standard treatise, essay anthology, or journal article.

I hope you enjoy it and that it gets you curious about the source material -- or, if Either/Or is already familiar to you, that it gives you something new.

Please feel free to leave your poem-plays in the comments.

🏅Ranked #1 for Interactivity and #2 Overall in shufPoetry's experimental poetry jam, where it won third place. Thanks for playing!

🎲 Now published in shufPoetry's Fall 2021 issue! Version 2.0's in the works.