Description:
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
Brief description: Sarah Wood teaches English literature and literary theory at the University of Kent. She is an Editor of Oxford Literary Review and of Angelaki. She is also a trainee at the Guild of Psychotherapists in London
Review Quotes: 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 time. Forcing 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.--Simon Glendinning, London School of Economics and Political Science