本文探討史坦因於二次世界大戰期間作品中展演的「遊戲詩學」，主要處理文本包括童話故事《世界是圓的》以及戰爭回憶錄《我所見到的戰爭》，探討在嚴肅戰爭情境下的孩童甚至成人們如何繼續遊戲，甚至將遊戲轉化為一種生存策略，乃至於生命藝術，可說以遊戲進行另類抗爭，戰爭書寫亦成了遊戲政治的宣示。我們首先將指出史坦因自早期詩作便已表現的遊戲美學以及將戰爭美學化的傾向，接下來我們將運用詹姆斯「信仰的意志」，兒童發展心理學與遊戲治療等理論，詮釋史坦因戰爭書寫中複雜微妙的遊戲心理學，並分析其如何影響文本的語言運用與敘事風格。

This essay attempts to explore the "poetics of playing" at work in Gertrude Stein's WWII works. The primary texts for analysis are a fairy tale The World is Round and a war memoir Wars I Have Seen. In them we see children and even adults continue their "play" despite serious wartime hardship, in the belief that playing itself can be strategy of survival, even "art de vivre" (art of living). It implies alternative war making through game playing; Stein's WWII works is thus a display of such politics of playing. We will first review Stein's language play and the aestheticization of war, both manifest since her early writings. Then we try to examine the psychology of playing in Stein's WWII writings in the light of theories of William James's "the will to believe," of children's' developmental psychology and of play therapy. Also studied will be its effects upon language use and narrative method.