Playing with Lines: Child Drawing and Modern Literary Experience

Before we write, we draw. In Playing with Lines, Thomas Gould reflects on the melancholic persistence of child drawing in modern and contemporary literary writing. Moving among psychoanalysis, philosophy, and poetry, the book argues for children’s drawings as textual forms that shape the horizon of literary experience. Through diverse and playful readings that include Anne Carson, Jacques Derrida, Marianne Moore, and D.W. Winnicott, Playing with Lines explores how writing repeatedly returns to drawing as a lost childhood counterpart: a site of play, expressive experimentation, and encounter with the external world. From the classical origin of drawing as a scene of youthful desire and loss, through the role of children’s drawings in the development of wartime psychoanalytic theory, to a range of writers’ reflections on their own childhood sketches, Playing with Lines traces a constellation of instances in which literature both recovers and represses forms of graphic infancy. Repositioning the study of word-image relations, it invites us to reflect on the squiggly lines between work and play, expression and selection, and childhood and adulthood.