Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces

Description

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. 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 Title Page Copyright Contents Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements 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? Notes Index