Longer Views: Extended EssaysWesleyan University Press, 15.03.2016 - 659 Seiten Six essays from the critic and award-winning author exploring topics such as theater, LGBTQ+ scholarship, cyborgs, metaphors, and Star Wars. “Reading is a many-layered process—like writing,” observes Samuel R. Delany, a Nebula and Hugo Award–winning author and a major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges what he calls “the hard-edged boundaries of meaning” by going beyond the customary limits of the genre in which he’s writing. By radically reworking the essay form, Delany can explore and express the many layers of his thinking about the nature of art, the workings of language, and the injustices and ironies of social, political, and sexual marginalization. Thus, Delany connects, in sometimes unexpected ways, topics as diverse as the origins of modern theater, the context of lesbian and gay scholarship, the theories of cyborgs, how metaphors mean, and the narrative structures in the Star Wars trilogy. “Over the course of his career,” Kenneth James writes in his extensive introduction, “Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by.” Indeed, Delany challenges an impressive list of world-models here, including High and Low Art, sanity and madness, mathematical logic and the mechanics of mythmaking, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the limitations of our sexual vocabulary. Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany’s unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views. “An intellectually adventurous book. . . . Every page of every essay here rewards a second reading, and a third. Delany has a fearsomely stocked intellect, and a wider range of experience than most writers can even imagine. . . . He is brilliant, driven, prolific.” —The Nation “One of science fiction’s grand masters. . . . Delany’s elegant command of language and deep insight into other authors’ works are delightful to behold.” —Booklist “Rare personal frankness and stunning erudition. . . . Recommended for readers who enjoy the challenge of being led into remote regions of a gifted mind.” —Library Journal |
Im Buch
Ergebnisse 1-5 von 35
Seite xvii
... English literature—a state of affairs which once led the great American essayist E. B. White, only half-jokingly, to call essay-writers second-class citizens. Critics of a more recent generation have tried to recuperate the essay by ...
... English literature—a state of affairs which once led the great American essayist E. B. White, only half-jokingly, to call essay-writers second-class citizens. Critics of a more recent generation have tried to recuperate the essay by ...
Seite 33
... English poetry. Yeats and Hardy are its high points. The first of these decades includes some of Hopkins's working period, but that work will not be discovered until later. Rudyard Kipling, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Bridges, George ...
... English poetry. Yeats and Hardy are its high points. The first of these decades includes some of Hopkins's working period, but that work will not be discovered until later. Rudyard Kipling, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Bridges, George ...
Seite 35
... English cliffs glimmered vastly, out in the water. (“–on the French coast, the light / Gleams and is gone . . .”) Arnold stood listening to “the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, / At their return, up the ...
... English cliffs glimmered vastly, out in the water. (“–on the French coast, the light / Gleams and is gone . . .”) Arnold stood listening to “the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, / At their return, up the ...
Seite 36
... English literature an academic discipline. Here is Professor George Gordon—among the first professors of English Literature at Oxford—in his inaugural lecture just on the near side of the Great War (as quoted by Terry Eagleton in his ...
... English literature an academic discipline. Here is Professor George Gordon—among the first professors of English Literature at Oxford—in his inaugural lecture just on the near side of the Great War (as quoted by Terry Eagleton in his ...
Seite 37
... English of these artists; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and his age than from all the rest together. Byron, the most English of English artists...? Was Taine ignorant of the ...
... English of these artists; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and his age than from all the rest together. Byron, the most English of English artists...? Was Taine ignorant of the ...
Inhalt
1 | |
A Reading of Donna Haraways Manifesto for Cyborgs Science Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s | 87 |
AversionPerversionDiversion | 119 |
Shadow and Ash | 144 |
Some Notes on Hart Crane | 174 |
Shadows | 251 |
Index | 325 |
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