“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”Was that chant prevalent in your grade school? Who said it? Who heard it? Whorepeated it? In the dialogical criticism of Longer Views, where the critiquesrespond to their own premises of exposition at the same time that they considervaried objectives, motives, and means of essay, "a stick" is not a stick but "words" are always words.Like a really smart schoolkid defusing the playground bully, Delany's essays remind the ready listeners - the active readers who write between the lines - to distinguish between words and their effects, ideas and their origins, actions and their motives, institutions and their consequences. "Rhetoric is the ash of discourse," begins "Shadows," chronologically the first essay in the book, but here placed at the end as an appendix. Since sticks and stones are not just sticks and stones, but also laser-guided missiles and policies of economic sanctions, the aim of Delany's explorations is to provide a model with which we can decipher the orders that deploy the sticks - to elaborate a counter-narrative that can remove the aura of inevitability around a discourse and reveal the rhetoric at its base."Every utterance," says Ken James at the end of the first section of his five-part Introduction, "no matter how much it evokes a transcendental system of authority to legitimate itself, can always be traced back to an individual or group with a historically, socially, and materially specific position." Words can never hurt me, but they can be used to dissuade me from investigating where people got those sticks. What's more, the absence of words can occlude sight of the fact that sticks and stones hurt worst when people throw them. It's more than okay, suggests this collection, to use words to illustrate the contingency of specific positions - that's also the inherent task of science fiction. By extension, an essay of dialogical dimensions can accomplish the same goal by employing formal tropes that tend towards the unfolding revelation that all things, including the essay itself, were at one time or another made, and can also be un-made - or is that a faulty premise? [continued below]
What do You think about Longer Views: Extended Essays (1996)?
