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Dhalgren
''Dhalgren'' is a 1975 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It features an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by an unknown catastrophe. Plot overview The city of Bellona is severely damaged; radio, television, and telephone signals do not reach it. People enter and leave by crossing a bridge on foot. Inexplicable events punctuate the novel: One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the sky. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times its normal size rises to terrify the populace, then retreats across the sky to set on the same horizon. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Straits Of Messina
''The Straits of Messina'' is a 1989 non-fiction collection of essays, in which author and critic Samuel R. Delany discusses his own novels. The essays are published under his own name, and under the pen name K. Leslie Steiner. The pieces by K. Leslie Steiner are written as an answer to the question "Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone say all the fine and brilliant things about my work I so desperately would like to hear…?" according to Delany's preface. The Strait of Messina of the title is a reference to the treacherous waters between Scylla and Charybdis, a metaphor on how difficult it is for an author to write about his own works: "to negotiate the waters between the Scylla of overweening self-importance and the Charybdis of childish self-deprecation." Contents * Preface * The Scorpion Garden :: From 1973, a proposed introduction to the as yet unpublished '' Hogg''. * "The Scorpion Garden" Revisited: A Note on the Anti-Pornography of Samuel R. Delany, by K. Leslie St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nova (novel)
''Nоva'' is a science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany and published in 1968. Nominally space opera, it explores the politics and culture of a future where cyborg technology is universal (the novel is one of the precursors to cyberpunk), yet making major decisions can involve using tarot cards. It has strong mythological overtones, relating to both the Grail Quest and Jason's ''Argonautica'' for the golden fleece. ''Nova'' was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969. In 1984, David Pringle listed it as one of the 100 best science-fiction novels written since 1949. After Delany completed ''Nova'' at the age of 25, his published output stopped for several years, although his writing continued. Delany completed the first draft of '' Tides of Lust'' (author's title, ''Equinox'') in September 1968 (it appeared in 1973). He first completed '' Hogg'' in June 1969 (though the novel itself would not appear until 1995). With the publication of his next major ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Möbius Strip
In mathematics, a Möbius strip, Möbius band, or Möbius loop is a surface that can be formed by attaching the ends of a strip of paper together with a half-twist. As a mathematical object, it was discovered by Johann Benedict Listing and August Ferdinand Möbius in 1858, but it had already appeared in Roman mosaics from the third century CE. The Möbius strip is a non-orientable surface, meaning that within it one cannot consistently distinguish clockwise from counterclockwise turns. Every non-orientable surface contains a Möbius strip. As an abstract topological space, the Möbius strip can be embedded into three-dimensional Euclidean space in many different ways: a clockwise half-twist is different from a counterclockwise half-twist, and it can also be embedded with odd numbers of twists greater than one, or with a knotted centerline. Any two embeddings with the same knot for the centerline and the same number and direction of twists are topologically equivalent. All of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multistable Perception
Multistable perception (or bistable perception) is a perceptual phenomenon in which an observer experiences an unpredictable sequence of spontaneous subjective changes. While usually associated with visual perception (a form of optical illusion), multistable perception can also be experienced with auditory and olfactory percepts. Classification Perceptual multistability can be evoked by visual patterns that are too ambiguous for the human visual system to definitively and uniquely interpret. Familiar examples include the Necker cube, Schroeder staircase, structure from motion, monocular rivalry, and binocular rivalry, but many more visually ambiguous patterns are known. Because most of these images lead to an alternation between two mutually exclusive perceptual states, they are sometimes also referred to as bistable perception. Auditory and olfactory examples can occur when there are conflicting, and so rival, inputs into the two ears or two nostrils. Characterization ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel R
Samuel ''Šəmūʾēl'', Tiberian: ''Šămūʾēl''; ar, شموئيل or صموئيل '; el, Σαμουήλ ''Samouḗl''; la, Samūēl is a figure who, in the narratives of the Hebrew Bible, plays a key role in the transition from the biblical judges to the United Kingdom of Israel under Saul, and again in the monarchy's transition from Saul to David. He is venerated as a prophet in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In addition to his role in the Hebrew scriptures, Samuel is mentioned in Jewish rabbinical literature, in the Christian New Testament, and in the second chapter of the Quran (although Islamic texts do not mention him by name). He is also treated in the fifth through seventh books of ''Antiquities of the Jews'', written by the Jewish scholar Josephus in the first century. He is first called "the Seer" in 1 Samuel 9:9. Biblical account Family Samuel's mother was Hannah and his father was Elkanah. Elkanah lived at Ramathaim in the district of Zuph. His genealog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Gass
William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, ''A Temple of Texts'' (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel '' The Tunnel'' received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel ''Middle C'' won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal. Early life and education William Howard Gass was born on July 30, 1924, in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, a steel town, where he attended local schools. He described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities. His father had been trained as an architect but, whi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Kermode
Sir John Frank Kermode, FBA (29 November 1919 – 17 August 2010) was a British literary critic best known for his 1967 work '' The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction'' and for his extensive book-reviewing and editing. He was the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. Kermode was known for many works of criticism, and also as editor of the popular Fontana Modern Masters series of introductions to modern thinkers. He was a regular contributor to the ''London Review of Books'' and ''The New York Review of Books''. Early life and education Kermode was born on the Isle of Man, the only son and elder child of John Pritchard Kermode (1894-1966) and Doris Pearl (1893-1967), née Kennedy. His father was a delivery truck driver and warehouseman for a ferry company, and his mother, a "farm girl", had been a waitress. The family was of "extremel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory. Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. Aft ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic. Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in poetry, the standard tones of the age." Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008, "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery" and "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound." Stephanie Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible". Ashbery published more than 20 volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection ''Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror''. Renowned for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Valéry
Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (; 30 October 1871 – 20 July 1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years. Biography Valéry was born to a Corsican father and Genoese-Istrian mother in Sète, a town on the Mediterranean coast of the Hérault, but he was raised in Montpellier, a larger urban center close by. After a traditional Roman Catholic education, he studied law at university and then resided in Paris for most of the remainder of his life, where he was, for a while, part of the circle of Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1900, he married Jeannine Gobillard, a friend of Stéphane Mallarmé's family, who was also a niece of the painter Berthe Morisot. The wedding was a double ceremony in which the bride's cousin, Berthe Morisot's daughter, Ju ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language.Biography: Rainer Maria Rilke 1875–1926 Poetry Foundation website. Retrieved 2 February 2013. His work has been seen by critics and scholars as having undertones of , exploring themes of subjective experience and disbelief. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Freedman (writer)
Carl Howard Freedman (born 1951) is an American writer, literary theorist and professor of English literature at Louisiana State University. He is best known for the non-fiction book ''Critical Theory and Science Fiction'', and his scholarly work on the writer Philip K. Dick. Freedman's other works include a series of books on Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany, and several essays and a book on China Miéville. In 2018, he won the Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to science fiction and fantasy scholarship. Life and career Carl Freedman was born in North Carolina in 1951. He received his BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Oxford University, and his PhD from Yale University. He is currently the William A. Read Professor of English literature at Louisiana State University, where he was named a distinguished research master in 2013. Freedman's most highly cited work is his 2000 book, ''Critical Theory and Science Fiction' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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