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 51
Seite xvii
... turns his considerable creative and analytical energies toward a radical reworking of the essay form. He does this ... turning this shapelessness into a plus-value, positing it as the ideal (non-)form with which to critique totalizing ...
... turns his considerable creative and analytical energies toward a radical reworking of the essay form. He does this ... turning this shapelessness into a plus-value, positing it as the ideal (non-)form with which to critique totalizing ...
Seite xxiii
... turn to consider the essays in this collection, we are faced with a choice: the choice of where to begin. In his Preface, Delany informs us that the essay in the Appendix to this collection, “Shadows,” was actually the first essay to be ...
... turn to consider the essays in this collection, we are faced with a choice: the choice of where to begin. In his Preface, Delany informs us that the essay in the Appendix to this collection, “Shadows,” was actually the first essay to be ...
Seite xxx
... turn implies a state of affairs which Delany expresses baldly and boldly: “For the record ... I do not believe castration as Freud and Lacan have described it even exists.” (RW 105) We find a hint of what this state of affairs itself ...
... turn implies a state of affairs which Delany expresses baldly and boldly: “For the record ... I do not believe castration as Freud and Lacan have described it even exists.” (RW 105) We find a hint of what this state of affairs itself ...
Seite xxxiii
... turn recalls and revalues the notion of the “absolute and indisseverable interface” of object and process explored in “Shadows"). On a human landscape defined in these terms, discourse and death become “problems of consciousness” of ...
... turn recalls and revalues the notion of the “absolute and indisseverable interface” of object and process explored in “Shadows"). On a human landscape defined in these terms, discourse and death become “problems of consciousness” of ...
Seite xxxviii
... turn to Haraway's manifesto, to do her or his own work, which alone can restructure mine. (RW 118) The universe of discourse these essays begin to map out is not monolithic, eternal, always-already complete. It is evolving, historical ...
... turn to Haraway's manifesto, to do her or his own work, which alone can restructure mine. (RW 118) The universe of discourse these essays begin to map out is not monolithic, eternal, always-already complete. It is evolving, historical ...
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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