Synopses & Reviews
Against Mastery reads a wealth of powerful literary material from Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Elizabeth Bowen, Hélène Cixous and Nicholas Royle. The book critically and creatively explores certain human or animal states (passivity, exclusion, humbleness, dependency, the child-like, loss, danger, folly, ambivalence and mortality itself) and relates them to the powers of writing and to vulnerability. It invites a rethinking of defences, of position-taking, and of what it means to take up or defend a theoretical position.
Synopsis
Speaks to and helps us address where we are now, institutionally, environmentally and in thinking about reading GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup( 'ISBN:9780748669974', 'ISBN:9780748669981']);
Without Mastery engages the pleasures and rigours of reading, invoking Shakespeare's Weird Sisters, Plato's Lady Necessity, Freud, Derrida, Cixous, animals, angels, ghosts and children to explore our desire for mastery - especially the omnipotence of thoughts. Masterful thinking has brought the planet into environmental crisis. The acquiescence of reading, Wood shows, allows us to make contact with the unthinkable.
Key Features:
- Provides a challenge and an alternative to 'masterful' or technical approaches to theory
- Demonstrates that writing and power can work productively together
- Draws on the power of poetry and fiction to help us think and puts this to work in the book's own practice of creative critical writing
- Presents original new readings of canonical literary writers
Synopsis
Speaks to and helps us address where we are now, institutionally, environmentally and in thinking about reading
Without Mastery engages the pleasures and rigours of reading, invoking Shakespeare's Weird Sisters, Plato's Lady Necessity, Freud, Derrida, Cixous, animals, angels, ghosts and children to explore our desire for mastery - especially the omnipotence of thoughts. Masterful thinking has brought the planet into environmental crisis. The acquiescence of reading, Wood shows, allows us to make contact with the unthinkable.
Synopsis
Without Mastery engages the pleasures and rigours of reading, invoking Shakespeare's Weird Sisters, Plato's Lady Necessity, Freud, Derrida, Cixous, animals, angels, ghosts and children to explore our desire for mastery - especially the omnipotence of thoughts. Masterful thinking has brought the planet into environmental crisis. The acquiescence of reading, Wood shows, allows us to make contact with the unthinkable.
About the Author
Sarah Wood teaches English literature and literary theory at the University of Kent. She is an Editor of
Oxford Literary Review and of
Angelaki. She is also a trainee at the Guild of Psychotherapists in London
Table of Contents
Through the Reader
Inventing the Reader
Try Thinking As If Perhaps
A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction
Close to the Earth
Beyond Me Nowhere But This Earth
Edit
Reading Matters
Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost (About the Fires of Writing)
Nightshift
Too Late To Begin?