Laura Wright, “Play in the Work of Carla Harryman” (Revista Canaria, 1998)

Laura Wright’s 1998 scholarly essay examines the centrality of “play” in the writing of Carla Harryman, tracing its manifestations across genre hybridity, performance, formal experimentation, and the slippages of meaning-making. Situating Memory Play alongside other major works such as Vice, Animal Instincts, and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn, Wright analyzes how Harryman mobilizes playfulness to challenge narrative convention and illuminate the unstable, generative terrain of language.