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 71
Seite ix
... fiction novellas—is treated as the least commercial of all works. When publishers are brave enough to undertake such collections, readers, support them both! I'm particularly grateful, then, to my editors, Terry Cochran and Preface.
... fiction novellas—is treated as the least commercial of all works. When publishers are brave enough to undertake such collections, readers, support them both! I'm particularly grateful, then, to my editors, Terry Cochran and Preface.
Seite x
... least two of them. “Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority—A Reading of Donna Haraway's 'Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”—has, in pieces, provided me with various ...
... least two of them. “Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority—A Reading of Donna Haraway's 'Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”—has, in pieces, provided me with various ...
Seite xi
... least once just before beginning the essay, to pause now and again to reread various sections of it on their first trip through my essay, and to read Crane's poem once more on finishing my notes here. (Poet James Tate suggests at least ...
... least once just before beginning the essay, to pause now and again to reread various sections of it on their first trip through my essay, and to read Crane's poem once more on finishing my notes here. (Poet James Tate suggests at least ...
Seite xv
... least monarchical, perhaps where sex hasn't wandered too far from its home base...” Clearly, the essay is ripe for a radical rhetorical intervention. Samuel R. Delany was born in 1942 and raised in New York City's Harlem. Something of a ...
... least monarchical, perhaps where sex hasn't wandered too far from its home base...” Clearly, the essay is ripe for a radical rhetorical intervention. Samuel R. Delany was born in 1942 and raised in New York City's Harlem. Something of a ...
Seite xx
... apprehension of the historicity of objects, landscapes, and social institutions. By this model we can also see that science fiction differs from the essay in at least one of the same ways that it differs xx Ken James.
... apprehension of the historicity of objects, landscapes, and social institutions. By this model we can also see that science fiction differs from the essay in at least one of the same ways that it differs xx Ken James.
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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