Ebook: Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces

Speaks to and helps us address where we are now, institutionally, environmentally and in thinking about reading
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 theory

Demonstrates that writing and power can work productively together

Draws 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 writing

Presents original new readings of canonical literary writers