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 ix
... 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.
... 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.
Página x
... readers have made wonderfully useful suggestions here and there during the composition process of these essays, including Don Eric Levine, Gordon Tapper, James Sallis, Ron Drummond, and all the editors just mentioned. This book contains ...
... readers have made wonderfully useful suggestions here and there during the composition process of these essays, including Don Eric Levine, Gordon Tapper, James Sallis, Ron Drummond, and all the editors just mentioned. This book contains ...
Página xi
... readers to procure a copy of that wonderfully rich poem, and—in fact—to read The Bridge through at 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 ...
... readers to procure a copy of that wonderfully rich poem, and—in fact—to read The Bridge through at 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 ...
Página xii
... readers will find an interesting piece of transitional thinking between the two traditions. And it prefigures much of the later work. If “Shadow and Ash” is the most important essay here, then “Shadows” is its lengthy, chrestomathic ...
... readers will find an interesting piece of transitional thinking between the two traditions. And it prefigures much of the later work. If “Shadow and Ash” is the most important essay here, then “Shadows” is its lengthy, chrestomathic ...
Página xiv
... reader that, whatever the ostensible subject-matter of the pieces to follow, “I myself am the subject of my book.” Ever since then, essayists have, with varying degrees of intensity, been committed to presenting “the spectacle of a ...
... reader that, whatever the ostensible subject-matter of the pieces to follow, “I myself am the subject of my book.” Ever since then, essayists have, with varying degrees of intensity, been committed to presenting “the spectacle of a ...
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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