Longer Views: Extended EssaysWesleyan University Press, 15 Mar 2016 - 659 halaman 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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Halaman x
... historical understanding. This is also the topic of “Shadow and Ash”—an intellectual chrestomathy whose fragmentary method is finally its content. For me it is the most important essay here—and the one that needs the least prefatory ...
... historical understanding. This is also the topic of “Shadow and Ash”—an intellectual chrestomathy whose fragmentary method is finally its content. For me it is the most important essay here—and the one that needs the least prefatory ...
Halaman xvi
... historical fiction with the short novel Atlantis: Model 1924, which details a meeting between characters modeled after Delany's own father as a young man and the poet Hart Crane, on the Brooklyn Bridge one bright afternoon in, yes, 1924 ...
... historical fiction with the short novel Atlantis: Model 1924, which details a meeting between characters modeled after Delany's own father as a young man and the poet Hart Crane, on the Brooklyn Bridge one bright afternoon in, yes, 1924 ...
Halaman xvii
... historical forces that generate cultural myths." The essays to follow share this concern. But they are also equally concerned with myth-breaking—with the analytical practices required to discern, interrogate, and dissolve myths. Nothing ...
... historical forces that generate cultural myths." The essays to follow share this concern. But they are also equally concerned with myth-breaking—with the analytical practices required to discern, interrogate, and dissolve myths. Nothing ...
Halaman xviii
... historical sleuthing, and much, much more—and they combine these topics in interlocking narratives of madmen and burning cities, prodigies and poets, cyborgs, street-hustlers, and the author's own life, in language that is sometimes ...
... historical sleuthing, and much, much more—and they combine these topics in interlocking narratives of madmen and burning cities, prodigies and poets, cyborgs, street-hustlers, and the author's own life, in language that is sometimes ...
Halaman xix
... historical and the natural. In viewing spectacle, “all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from" (M 151). Likewise, the aphorism is “no longer directed towards a world to be made ...
... historical and the natural. In viewing spectacle, “all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from" (M 151). Likewise, the aphorism is “no longer directed towards a world to be made ...
Isi
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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