Without Mastery by Sarah Wood
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 theoryDemonstrates that writing and power can work productively togetherDraws 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 writingPresents original new readings of canonical literary writers
From the first word that isn’t a beginning word to the last word that isn’t a concluding word Sarah Wood’s gripping text journeys us through ourselves in our timeForcing us beyond a puffed-up and thin-skinned narcissism that supposes human beings the admirable centre of everything, and finding ourselves again, uncleansed, as a force that distinguishes itself, above all, in destructiveness. This is an (un)timely work of a well versed (in)sister. It is serious without being pious, and critical without being aloof. It is writing worth reading for.
Sarah Wood is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and writer. She is author of Derrida’s Writing and Difference (2009) and Robert Browning: A Literary Life (2001), as well as editor of a number of theory journal special issues such as Home and Family (1995), Hotel Psychoanalysis (2004), Deconstruction and Poetry (2011) and Ext: Writing Extinction (2019). She has given keynotes, symposium papers and published numerous essays on literature, criticism, theory, philosophy and culture, engaging with the writings of Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Freud, Fred Moten and many others to discern and transmit radical practices of writing and reading. She alighted from academia in 2018 as Reader in English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Kent.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781399574891 |
| ISBN 10 | 1399574892 |
| Title | Without Mastery |
| Author | Sarah Wood |
| Series | The Frontiers Of Theory |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press |
| Number of pages | 208 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |