Longer Views: Extended EssaysWesleyan University Press, 15/03/2016 - 659 páginas 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 |
No interior do livro
Resultados 1-5 de 8
Página ii
... Dhalgren Trouble on Triton (Triton) Distant Stars (stories) Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand Return to Nevèryon: Tales of Nevèryon Neveryöna Flight from Nevèryon Return to Nevèryon (The Bridge of Lost Desire) Driftglass ...
... Dhalgren Trouble on Triton (Triton) Distant Stars (stories) Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand Return to Nevèryon: Tales of Nevèryon Neveryöna Flight from Nevèryon Return to Nevèryon (The Bridge of Lost Desire) Driftglass ...
Página xvi
... Dhalgren, which—with its story of a bisexual amnesiac's rise to fame in a mysteriously burnedout midwestern city, its frank depictions of marginal sexual practices and the social forces surrounding and pervading them, and its ...
... Dhalgren, which—with its story of a bisexual amnesiac's rise to fame in a mysteriously burnedout midwestern city, its frank depictions of marginal sexual practices and the social forces surrounding and pervading them, and its ...
Página xvii
... Dhalgren, Triton, and that undecidable hybrid of theory and fiction, Return to Nevèryon: dialectical framing structures, short textual units numbered in Wittgensteinian fashion, multiply-intersecting stories, and so on. By deploying ...
... Dhalgren, Triton, and that undecidable hybrid of theory and fiction, Return to Nevèryon: dialectical framing structures, short textual units numbered in Wittgensteinian fashion, multiply-intersecting stories, and so on. By deploying ...
Página xxiv
... (Dhalgren is similarly structured, but there the central/marginal relation is more subtle.) Let us say, purely for the sake of argument, that we have chosen to read “Shadows” first. The first thing we notice about “Shadows” is its ...
... (Dhalgren is similarly structured, but there the central/marginal relation is more subtle.) Let us say, purely for the sake of argument, that we have chosen to read “Shadows” first. The first thing we notice about “Shadows” is its ...
Página xxviii
... Dhalgren and Neveryóna. Like the framing structures of those earlier works, the theater-metaphor framing “Wagner/Artaud" yields up two equally viable yet mutually subversive readings, neither of which can crystallize out into “the ...
... Dhalgren and Neveryóna. Like the framing structures of those earlier works, the theater-metaphor framing “Wagner/Artaud" yields up two equally viable yet mutually subversive readings, neither of which can crystallize out into “the ...
Índice
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 |
Outras edições - Ver tudo
Palavras e frases frequentes
actually already appear argument Artaud asked become begins Bridge called castration certainly complete considered context course Crane critical cyborg death Delany discourse English essay experience fact feel finally given hand Hart historical homosexual human idea interesting language later least less letter light lines lived logical look male meaning metaphor mind move myth never night notes object once opening play poem poet poetic poetry political position possible present Press problem produce published question radical reader relation rhetorical science fiction seems sense sentence sexual side simply social story structure suggests tell theater things thought tion true turn University various Wagner whole women writing written wrote York young