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Longer Views: Extended Essays
A comprehensive expansion of the theoretical writings of one of our most important cultural critics.
"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.
"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.
384 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1996
13 people are currently reading
129 people want to read
About the author
Samuel R. Delany
307 books2,256 followersSamuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.
Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.
In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.
In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 2, 2016
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
Was that chant prevalent in your grade school? Who said it? Who heard it? Who
repeated it? In the dialogical criticism of Longer Views, where the critiques
respond to their own premises of exposition at the same time that they consider
varied objectives, motives, and means of essay, "a stick" is not a stick but "words" are always words.
Like a really smart schoolkid defusing the playground bully, Delany's essays remind the ready listeners - the active readers who write between the lines - to distinguish between words and their effects, ideas and their origins, actions and their motives, institutions and their consequences.
"Rhetoric is the ash of discourse," begins "Shadows," chronologically the first essay in the book, but here placed at the end as an appendix. Since sticks and stones are not just sticks and stones, but also laser-guided missiles and policies of economic sanctions, the aim of Delany's explorations is to provide a model with which we can decipher the orders that deploy the sticks - to elaborate a counter-narrative that can remove the aura of inevitability around a discourse and reveal the rhetoric at its base.
"Every utterance," says Ken James at the end of the first section of his five-part Introduction, "no matter how much it evokes a transcendental system of authority to legitimate itself, can always be traced back to an individual or group with a historically, socially, and materially specific position." Words can never hurt me, but they can be used to dissuade me from investigating where people got those sticks. What's more, the absence of words can occlude sight of the fact that sticks and stones hurt worst when people throw them.
It's more than okay, suggests this collection, to use words to illustrate the contingency of specific positions - that's also the inherent task of science fiction. By extension, an essay of dialogical dimensions can accomplish the same goal by employing formal tropes that tend towards the unfolding revelation that all things, including the essay itself, were at one time or another made, and can also be un-made - or is that a faulty premise?
[continued below]
Was that chant prevalent in your grade school? Who said it? Who heard it? Who
repeated it? In the dialogical criticism of Longer Views, where the critiques
respond to their own premises of exposition at the same time that they consider
varied objectives, motives, and means of essay, "a stick" is not a stick but "words" are always words.
Like a really smart schoolkid defusing the playground bully, Delany's essays remind the ready listeners - the active readers who write between the lines - to distinguish between words and their effects, ideas and their origins, actions and their motives, institutions and their consequences.
"Rhetoric is the ash of discourse," begins "Shadows," chronologically the first essay in the book, but here placed at the end as an appendix. Since sticks and stones are not just sticks and stones, but also laser-guided missiles and policies of economic sanctions, the aim of Delany's explorations is to provide a model with which we can decipher the orders that deploy the sticks - to elaborate a counter-narrative that can remove the aura of inevitability around a discourse and reveal the rhetoric at its base.
"Every utterance," says Ken James at the end of the first section of his five-part Introduction, "no matter how much it evokes a transcendental system of authority to legitimate itself, can always be traced back to an individual or group with a historically, socially, and materially specific position." Words can never hurt me, but they can be used to dissuade me from investigating where people got those sticks. What's more, the absence of words can occlude sight of the fact that sticks and stones hurt worst when people throw them.
It's more than okay, suggests this collection, to use words to illustrate the contingency of specific positions - that's also the inherent task of science fiction. By extension, an essay of dialogical dimensions can accomplish the same goal by employing formal tropes that tend towards the unfolding revelation that all things, including the essay itself, were at one time or another made, and can also be un-made - or is that a faulty premise?
[continued below]
November 20, 2007
Samuel R. Delaney = love. Well-written essays that make you wish you were as smart and insightful as he is.
May 10, 2016
excellent analysis of donna haraway's seminal "cyborg manifesto"
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews