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 xv
... sentences in this passage to waver between description and injunction; note too how the passage gathers rhetorical energy as its sentences approach the aphoristic. I would argue that the personal focus of this passage and its ...
... sentences in this passage to waver between description and injunction; note too how the passage gathers rhetorical energy as its sentences approach the aphoristic. I would argue that the personal focus of this passage and its ...
Página xl
... Sentence (New York: Roof Books, 1989), p. 30. 31. See O. B. Hardison, Jr.'s “Binding Proteus,” from Essays on the Essay (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 17–20, and the Translator's Introduction to Montaigne's ...
... Sentence (New York: Roof Books, 1989), p. 30. 31. See O. B. Hardison, Jr.'s “Binding Proteus,” from Essays on the Essay (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 17–20, and the Translator's Introduction to Montaigne's ...
Página 22
... sentence that strays to the edge of coherence to claw its way across into a derangement that, hopelessly mixed with the poetic, nevertheless signs itself as something outside of craft, consciousness, or considered reflection, that ...
... sentence that strays to the edge of coherence to claw its way across into a derangement that, hopelessly mixed with the poetic, nevertheless signs itself as something outside of craft, consciousness, or considered reflection, that ...
Página 24
... sentences, internal directions of thought, simple reactions of the mind—I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus as soon as I can grasp a form, however imperfect, I pin it down, for a fear of losing the whole thought. I ...
... sentences, internal directions of thought, simple reactions of the mind—I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus as soon as I can grasp a form, however imperfect, I pin it down, for a fear of losing the whole thought. I ...
Página 26
... sentences, protesting that his misplaced modifiers, clichés, and wrongly used words are exactly what he meant to write, is the language Artaud uses to detail his position, the energy with which he expresses his ideas, and the general ...
... sentences, protesting that his misplaced modifiers, clichés, and wrongly used words are exactly what he meant to write, is the language Artaud uses to detail his position, the energy with which he expresses his ideas, and the general ...
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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