Encountering Ulysses Delany, Samuel R.
Textual practice,
02/01/2022, 2022-02-01, 20220201, Letnik:
36, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
When I think about reading Joyce—or reading for writing about Joyce—I remember a colleague at the University of Massachusetts’s Comparative Literature Department, Maria Tymoczko, who took a ...sabbatical to visit the deposit library at Zürich, where so much of Ulysses was written, to trace all of the books Joyce had borrowed during his stay there and reread them for himself in a kind of intellectual homage to John Livingston Lowe’s readings of the Coleridge’s library back when he was writing ‘The Ancient Mariner’. This is the kind of work a book such as Ulysses can inspire.
The Mirror of Afrofuturism Delany, Samuel R
Extrapolation,
03/2020, Letnik:
61, Številka:
1-2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Unless we set up our critical mirrors very carefully, arguably there is no such thing as Afrofuturism. I contend that what is needed for Afrofuturism is black characters in the future, irrespective ...of the writer’s race. I begin with the term’s coining by white critic Mark Dery and examine Afrofuturism in Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1953), Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration (1968), and Octavia E. Butler’s “Amnesty” (2003). I repeat: to the extent Afrofuturism concerns science fiction and not the range of all the arts, including painting and music, classical and jazz, it requires writers writing about black characters in the future. Afrofuturism is pretty much anything you want it to be and not a rigorous category at all.
Delany examines Willa Cather's A Lost Lady. Much of the life in Cather's fiction comes from the writer's love of her central women. A Lost Lady is strewn with conservative tropes, and Cather has the ...good conservative's awareness of the importance of money and its relationship to happiness and the good life for pretty much everyone, up and down the social ladder.
Phallos Reid-Pharr, Robert F; Delany, Samuel R; James, Kenneth R ...
2013
eBook
<!CDATAPhallos is a 2004 novel by acclaimed novelist and critic, Samuel R. Delany. Taking the form of a gay pornographic novel, only with the explicit sex omitted, Phallos is set during the reign of ...the second century Roman Emperor Hadrian, and circles around the historical account of the murder of the emperor's young lover, Antinous. The story moves from Syracuse to Egypt, from the Pillars of Hercules to Rome, from Athens to Byzantium, and back. Young Neoptolomus searches after the stolen phallos of the nameless god of Hermopolis, crafted of gold and encrusted with jewels, within which are reputedly the ancient secrets of science and society that will lead to power, knowledge, and wealth. Vivid and clever, the original novella has been expanded by nearly a third. As well, editor Robert Reid-Pharr has appended to the text an afterword and three astute speculative essays by Steven Shapiro, Kenneth James, and Darieck Scott.>
Samuel R. Delany, whose theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy has won him a broad audience among academics and fans of postmodernist fiction, offers insights into and explorations ...of his own experience as writer, critic, theorist, and gay black man in his new collection of written interviews, a form he describes as a type of guided essay. Gathered from sources as diverse as Diacritics and Comics Journal, these interviews reveal the broad range of his thought and interests.
Longer Views Delany, Samuel R
2016, 2011-03-01
eBook
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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