their most favoured strategy: the ludic self

- a literary persona that toyed with the very idea of being single, unitary consciousness -
being the self that plays with its boundaries and masks (playful)
Gloried in characters' contradiction, writhing deliciously on the prongs of irony and mockery, adopting contrary stances and antitethical positions as their mood saw fit. And...ended up almost as pop-culture cliche (haha): Hamlet's eternal anxiety about whether he 'is' (or isn't), Machiavelli's cynical play of masks invoked by every political columnist.
Finally there is more that unites Renaissance's John Dunne and Eminem: compulsive adopters of personae, self-dramatizing through hyperbole and bathos, occupying the same long tradition of free, egoistic ludicism.



(watching Luis Arellano and Mikey Markullin cracks up jokes in Manning's class)