Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces

Series: The Frontiers of Theory

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