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 xiii
... form in the sixteenthcentury writings of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. From Montaigne, for example, we inherit (among other things) a focus Extensions: An Introduction to the Longer Views of Samuel R. Delany.
... form in the sixteenthcentury writings of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. From Montaigne, for example, we inherit (among other things) a focus Extensions: An Introduction to the Longer Views of Samuel R. Delany.
Página xiv
... things) a focus on the personal, on the authorial subject as the ground and goal of analytical inquiry. Montaigne prefaced his epoch-making Essais with a warning to the reader that, whatever the ostensible subject-matter of the pieces ...
... things) a focus on the personal, on the authorial subject as the ground and goal of analytical inquiry. Montaigne prefaced his epoch-making Essais with a warning to the reader that, whatever the ostensible subject-matter of the pieces ...
Página xvi
... things, the very nature of science fiction, which continues in various circles to this day; and in 1979, Delany published the first of what would become four volumes of interlocking narratives collectively known as Return to Nevèryon ...
... things, the very nature of science fiction, which continues in various circles to this day; and in 1979, Delany published the first of what would become four volumes of interlocking narratives collectively known as Return to Nevèryon ...
Página xviii
... thing as a “shapeless” discourse unfixed by pre-existing rhetorical practices, or that any single rhetorical mode could serve as the “primitive calculus” underlying everything subsequent to it—which Delany has called into question time ...
... thing as a “shapeless” discourse unfixed by pre-existing rhetorical practices, or that any single rhetorical mode could serve as the “primitive calculus” underlying everything subsequent to it—which Delany has called into question time ...
Página xix
... things lose the memory that they once were made” (M 142). Both the aphoristic style and the spectacle work to reinforce this confounding of the historical and the natural. In viewing spectacle, “all that is left for one to do is to ...
... things lose the memory that they once were made” (M 142). Both the aphoristic style and the spectacle work to reinforce this confounding of the historical and the natural. In viewing spectacle, “all that is left for one to do is to ...
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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