Literary Criticism Books

Motel of the Mysteries

David Macaulay

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Gentle poke at our preconceptions 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I've carried my copy of this book over many moves. It grows on me each time I read it. Originally it seemed just a humourous retelling of the Carter discovery of Tutankhamun and the Egyptian hysteria that accompanies it. Later on, after getting much more involved in arguments over interpretations of Roman historical artifacts, I realized how to the point the book is about the way we see the past and argue over the meaning of what we see. Still really funny though.

Editorial Review:

It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.

The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do With the Other

Walker Percy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A brilliant and relatively unknown work 5 out of 5 stars.
21 of 24 people found this review helpful.

This dense, well-written and extraordinary book is an excellent introduction to the works of a great 20th century thinker. In this collection of essays, Percy manages to confront some difficult philosophical questions in an exciting and readable context. Percy was first a novelist, and his writing is seldom inaccesible. He deals in everything from religion to science, from literary theory to travel. His best writing relates to theories of language and the human being. Yet like some of the greatest X-Files episodes, Percy leaves many things unresolved, liminal, only suggested. Message in a Bottle is designed to stimulate the reader rather than fill them with useless information. I finished reading this book with the desire to read it again, and whenever I see it on the bookshelf I am comforted by the thought that there are people in the world who think for themselves, and who have the courage to print what they think.

Editorial Review:

In Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy offers insights on such varied yet interconnected subjects as symbolic reasoning, the origins of mankind, Helen Keller, Semioticism, and the incredible Delta Factor. Confronting difficult philosophical questions with a novelist's eye, Percy rewards us again and again with his keen insights into the way that language possesses all of us.

Intimacies

Leo Bersani, Adam Phillips

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Two gifted and highly prolific intellectuals, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, here present a fascinating dialogue about the problems and possibilities of human intimacy. Their conversation takes as its point of departure psychoanalysis and its central importance to the modern imagination—though equally important is their shared sense that by misleading us about the importance of self-knowledge and the danger of narcissism, psychoanalysis has failed to realize its most exciting and innovative relational potential.
In pursuit of new forms of intimacy they take up a range of concerns across a variety of contexts. To test the hypothesis that the essence of the analytic exchange is intimate talk without sex, they compare Patrice Leconte’s film about an accountant mistaken for a psychoanalyst, Intimate Strangers, with Henry James’s classic novella The Beast in the Jungle. A discussion of the radical practice of barebacking—unprotected anal sex between gay men—delineates an intimacy that rejects the personal. Even serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Bush administration’s war on terror enter the scene as the conversation turns to the way aggression thrills and gratifies the ego. Finally, in a reading of Socrates’ theory of love from Plato’s Phaedrus, Bersani and Phillips call for a new form of intimacy which they term “impersonal narcissism”: a divestiture of the ego and a recognition of one’s non-psychological potential self in others. This revolutionary way of relating to the world, they contend, could lead to a new human freedom by mitigating the horrifying violence we blithely accept as part of human nature.
Charmingly persuasive and daringly provocative, Intimacies is a rare opportunity to listen in on two brilliant thinkers as they explore new ways of thinking about the human psyche.

(20080411)

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (Sexual Cultures)

Judith Halberstam

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Halberstam's marvelous new book combines fierce argumentation, vivid description, and astute as well as hilarious commentary. The author not only provides a powerful critique of common defenses and dismissals of 'postmodernism,' but offers a redefinition of 'identity politics' for the new millennium as well.
—Lisa Duggan, author of Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy

In her first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. She presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms—especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture.

In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don't Cry, Halberstam turns her attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. She examines the "transgender gaze," as rendered in small art-house films like By Hook or By Crook, as well as figurations of ambiguous embodiment in the art of Del LaGrace Volcano, Jenny Saville, Eva Hesse, Shirin Neshat, and others. She then exposes the influence of lesbian drag king cultures upon hetero-male comic films, such as Austin Powers and The Full Monty, and, finally, points to dyke subcultures as one site for the development of queer counterpublics and queer temporalities.

Considering the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of space and time, In a Queer Time and Place is the first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music. This pioneering book offers both a jumping off point for future analysis of transgenderism and an important new way to understand cultural constructions of time and place.

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Series Q)

Eve Sedgwick

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A pioneer in queer theory and literary studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings together for the first time in Touching Feeling her most powerful explorations of emotion and expression. In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion."

In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Experiences

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent Book! Recommended to all mental health professionals! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I enjoyed the introspective approach the author's took in describing the social-political perspective of LGB (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) individuals. Various essays throughout the book explores the hidden lives of LBG and themes such as identity, hate crimes, the incidences of gay teen suicides, and other mental health issues. This book was rich in substance and written by well-respected mental health experts in the field of LGBT studies.

Editorial Review:

-- Laura S. Brown, professor of psychology, Argosy University

Breathe

Blair, R. Poole

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Eye Opening 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the novel "Breathe" by Blair R. Poole. I was so entrenched in reading the book that I finished it in one day. I couldn't put it down. Beginning with page one to the final page. The topics and issues highlighted in the book are commonplace in our society today - that is why many young men choose to hide who they really are - and in a sense suffocate by trying to be someone other than their true selves. They are not allowed to breathe because of prejudices and ignorance.

Editorial Review:

BREATHE is the story of a teenage boy's struggle to keep his sexuality a secret from his devout religious family and homophobic friends. BREATHE, which is set against the backdrop of contemporary city life and hip-hop culture, is written with a passion and verve reminiscent of James Earl Hardy. A realistic portrayal of the isolation, angst, and mental turmoil of a young African-American male coping with his sexuality, BREATHE is a magnificent work of American fiction. Blair R. Poole's prose undoubtedly leaves you anxiously turning the pages to find out the protagonist's Fate. And, after you read it, you'll truly want to breathe!

Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance

Lewis Ellingham, Kevin Killian

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the time it first emerged as a renegade liberating voice in the early 1950s, beat writing changed the American social literary scene. Poets like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti altered the sound of U.S. poetry while Jack Kerouac's bebop chant--particularly in his classic On the Road--literally changed how Americans spoke. The beats' fame became so great so quickly that their critics accused them of hypocrisy. Not so Jack Spicer; while Ginsberg and Kerouac were busy publishing and promoting their work, Spicer--whose original lyric voice and gay content still resonate today--spent most of his time disdaining the publishing world and making enemies. In Poet Be Like God, journalist Lewis Ellingham and experimental novelist Kevin Killian have produced not only a fully realized portrait of Spicer, but a complexly woven historical and literary tapestry. Spicer emerges here as a brilliant, difficult, and largely unlikable man whose talent for writing matched his inability to function in the world. Ellingham and Killian are equally concerned with explicating the San Francisco renaissance and charting the emergence of North Beach as a gay neighborhood; Poet Be Like God thus rediscovers Jack Spicer for a new generation of readers and presents us with a unique and startling look at gay and literary history. --Michael Bronski

Monster Theory: Reading Culture

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The Monster and You 4 out of 5 stars.
14 of 14 people found this review helpful.

"Monster Theory" is a collection of essays which provide useful ideas and concepts if you are interested in making sense of this time of monsters we live in.

Of course, monsters have been with us for some time, and the book contains essays dealing with vampires, Frankenstein's monster and Beowulf. There is also an essay on Jurassic Park and the fascination of dinosaurs. For me, the most useful text by far was the one by editor Jeffery Jerome Cohen, in which he described seven theses on the role of monsters in culture.

I found the concepts in this book useful when writing papers about such diverse topics as children's literature (monsters and the monstrous in children's lit) and popular culture (the role of the vampire).

Monsters embody borderline concepts, things we worry about. Monsters are the things that trouble us at night. Whenever society is insecure and needs to find a new balance, monsters stalk the perimeter of the fence we have put up around "normality" and challenge us to alter the demarcations.

I feel that anyone interested in monsters and their role in culture would profit from reading this book - and not just the student or scholar of popular culture.

Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian: A Literary Anthology

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Almost, but not quite.... 3 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This was good, but not really what I expected to get. The selections are all well chosen, but after reading each of the excerpts I wanted to read more. Maybe that's the purpose. However, I felt like this anthology is just the tip of the iceberg concerning gay/lesbian literature about growing up. Overall--a good summary, but if you're looking for something more in-depth, try reading something else.

Worth Reading 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I first bought this book about a week after I had come out to my closest friends. I found this book to be a lifeline. I finally felt like I wasn't alone, I wasn't the only one. The book, however, left me with one complaint, that it ended! The stories touch you in a way that is so deeply personal. I found myself identifying with the characters. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone, gay, straight, questioning, whatever. It is worth reading!

Editorial Review:

Growing up Gay, Growing up Lesbian is the first literary anthology geared specifically to gay and lesbian youth. It includes more than fifty coming-of-age stories by established writers and teenagers and has been hailed by writers, educators, activists, booksellers, and the press as an essential resource for young people--and not-so-young people--seeking to understand the gay and lesbian experience. The anthology includes selections by James Baldwin, Rita Mae Brown, David Leavitt, Jeanette Winterson, Audre Lorde, and others.