I had read most of Susan Sontag’s non-fiction, and then I didn’t read her novel, so it makes sense that I would read all of Samuel Delany’s fiction, but then not read his essay collection “Longer Views”. Don’t you think?
It demonstrates the mirror image stage in specifying the signifiers signified by m/othering the other.
I’m sorry. I love Delany’s writing to bits, but the post-structuralism (or whatever) on display here may have been amusing at the time, but now it’s kinda boring. Making fun of people who quote Lacan and Kristeva is also way boring, so I’m not going to.
What!
I’ll just leave you with this quote (which is kinda emblematic, in both a good and bad way, of this book):
“Rhetoric is the ash of discourse.”
So there:
Rating: Rhetoriffic.