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 |
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Página x
... metaphor that seems to me necessarily anterior to any discussion of how any metaphor, such as the “cyborg,” can work in the radical directions Haraway's manifesto proposes for it. On the evening of November 1, 1991, “Aversion/Perversion ...
... metaphor that seems to me necessarily anterior to any discussion of how any metaphor, such as the “cyborg,” can work in the radical directions Haraway's manifesto proposes for it. On the evening of November 1, 1991, “Aversion/Perversion ...
Página xx
... metaphor for any psychic mystery or psychological state. Not to understand this object-critique, on whatever intuitive level, is to misread the phrase ... (SW 188) By this rhetorical model, we can see that even the most conservatively ...
... metaphor for any psychic mystery or psychological state. Not to understand this object-critique, on whatever intuitive level, is to misread the phrase ... (SW 188) By this rhetorical model, we can see that even the most conservatively ...
Página xxvi
... metaphorical correspondences between objects, events, and situations— shades over into an oppressive process of mistaken identity and confounding doubling in the later ones). The reader can also find an early articulation of Delany's ...
... metaphorical correspondences between objects, events, and situations— shades over into an oppressive process of mistaken identity and confounding doubling in the later ones). The reader can also find an early articulation of Delany's ...
Página xxvii
... metaphorical reading of this episode: . . . one reason it is sometimes so hard to evaluate Wagner's influence is because ... metaphor for pervasiveness—the images are too vivid, too concrete. There is an excess of signification. In the ...
... metaphorical reading of this episode: . . . one reason it is sometimes so hard to evaluate Wagner's influence is because ... metaphor for pervasiveness—the images are too vivid, too concrete. There is an excess of signification. In the ...
Página xxviii
... metaphor—theater as discourse—has, by its own signifying excess, overturned and revealed its subversive underside. The deployment of a self-deconstructing framing structure here recalls the beginnings-and-endings of several of Delany's ...
... metaphor—theater as discourse—has, by its own signifying excess, overturned and revealed its subversive underside. The deployment of a self-deconstructing framing structure here recalls the beginnings-and-endings of several of Delany's ...
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 |
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