Writing And Desire

Student Writing presents an accessible and thought-provoking study of academic writing practices. Informed by 'composition' research from the US and 'academic literacies studies' from the UK, the book challenges current official discourse on writing as a 'skill'. Lillis argues for an approach which sees student writing as social practice. The book draws extensively on a three-year study with ten non-traditional students in higher education and their experience of academic writing. Using case study material - including literacy history interviews, extended discussions with students about their writing of discipline specific essays, and extracts from essays - Lillis identifies the following as three significant dimensions to academic writing: * Access to higher education and to its language and literacy representational resources * Regulation of meaning making in academic writing * Desire for participation in higher education and for choices over ways of meaning in academic writing. Student Writing: access, regulation, desire raises questions about why academics write as they do, who benefits from such writing, which meanings are valued and how, on what terms 'outsiders' get to be 'insiders' and at what costs.

Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award Longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award A TIME, NPR, New York Public Library, Lit Hub, Book Riot, and Entropy Best Book of the Year "Beguiling and haunting. . . . Washuta's voice sears itself onto the skin." —The New York Times Book Review Bracingly honest and powerfully affecting, White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists. Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, “starter witch kits” of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning. In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life—Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham—to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.

The story of southern writing—the Dixie Limited, if you will—runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture. For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it. Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies. The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

"When do you follow your desire?" writers were asked. "When do you censor it? When is it a force to be trusted, and when do you become suspicious? When is it a source of power, and when a source of distress?" The answers fill this deliciously daring, eloquent book. Whether describing the satisfactions of a long-term relationship or the thrill of the first time with someone new, secret crushes or unabashed attractions, these writers -- including Shani Mootoo and Carol Shields -- are working at the top of their form. Sometimes subtle, sometimes raunchy, but always provocative, these essays challenge prevailing myths about women, love, and lust.

Exploring nearly sixty years of memoir and autobiography, Writing Desire examines the changing identity of gay men writing within a historical context. Distinguished scholar and psychoanalyst Bertram J. Cohler has carefully selected a diverse group of ten men, including historians, activists, journalists, poets, performance artists, and bloggers, whose life writing evokes the evolution of gay life in twentieth-century America. By contrasting the personal experience of these disparate writers, Cohler illustrates the social transformations that these men helped shape. Among Cohler's diverse subjects is Alan Helms, whose journey from Indiana to New York's gay society represents the passage of men who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, when homosexuality was considered a hidden "disease." The liberating effects of Stonewall's aftermath are chronicled in the life of Arnie Kantrowitz, the prototypical activist for gay rights in the 1970s and the founder the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation. The artistic works of Tim Miller and Mark Doty evoke loss and shock during of the early stages of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Cohler rounds out this collective group portrait by looking at the newest generation of writers in the Internet age via the blog of BrYaN, who did the previously unthinkable: he "outed" himself to millions of people. A compelling mix of social history and personal biography, Writing Desire distills the experience of three generations of gay America. Finalist, LGBT Studies, Lambda Literary Foundation

In the 1970s, Kelly's transgressive projects helped to instigate conceptual art's second phase; her daring critiques of the female body as a fetishized, allegorized, commodified site were debated long after they were first seen in galleries and discussed in catalogues, and long before the debut of the "bad girls" in the 1990s. In fact, the debates currently surrounding Kelly's work are a necessary and defining element of theoretical discourse about art today.

The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet. In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian. Avant Desire moves through Brossard’s body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongside canonical ones and intertextual and responsive work from a variety of artist translators at various stages of their careers. Through their selections, the editors trace Brossard’s fusion of lesbian feminist desire with innovation, experimentation, and activism, emphasizing the more overtly political nature of her early work and its transition into performative thinking. Devotees of Brossard will be invigorated by the range of previously unavailable materials included here, while new readings will find a thread of inquiry that is more than a mere introduction to her complex body of work. Avant Desire situates Brossard’s thinking across her oeuvre as that of a writer whose sights are always cast toward the horizon.