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 46
Seite x
... sexuality, even as its topic is the concept of discourse and its necessity for any sophisticated historical understanding. This is also the topic of “Shadow and Ash”—an intellectual chrestomathy whose fragmentary method is finally its ...
... sexuality, even as its topic is the concept of discourse and its necessity for any sophisticated historical understanding. This is also the topic of “Shadow and Ash”—an intellectual chrestomathy whose fragmentary method is finally its ...
Seite xvi
... sexual identity and practice. For this aspect of his work, in 1993 he was given the fifth William Whitehead Memorial Award for Lifetime Contribution to Gay and Lesbian Literature, an honor he shares with Edmund White, Audre Lorde ...
... sexual identity and practice. For this aspect of his work, in 1993 he was given the fifth William Whitehead Memorial Award for Lifetime Contribution to Gay and Lesbian Literature, an honor he shares with Edmund White, Audre Lorde ...
Seite xvii
... sexual difference, of biography, of the canon, and indeed of the very concept of “literature.” But these essays also interrogate a myth of the essay itself: specifically, the traditional perception of the essay as a “shapeless” form of ...
... sexual difference, of biography, of the canon, and indeed of the very concept of “literature.” But these essays also interrogate a myth of the essay itself: specifically, the traditional perception of the essay as a “shapeless” form of ...
Seite xviii
... sexual practices, from the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe to the intricacies of literary historical sleuthing, and much, much more—and they combine these topics in interlocking narratives of madmen and burning cities, prodigies and ...
... sexual practices, from the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe to the intricacies of literary historical sleuthing, and much, much more—and they combine these topics in interlocking narratives of madmen and burning cities, prodigies and ...
Seite xxx
... sexual experiences—stories which both evoke and subvert prevailing sexual myths. The discursive object against which Delany deploys these stories is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the concept of Gay Identity itself— or rather, the more ...
... sexual experiences—stories which both evoke and subvert prevailing sexual myths. The discursive object against which Delany deploys these stories is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the concept of Gay Identity itself— or rather, the more ...
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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