Desire: A Memoir

ISBN-13: 9781350023109 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 192 str.

UK) Jonathan Dollimore (Independent Scholar

Opis

Fifty years after the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised homosexual acts, Jonathan Dollimore explores, in, through and beyond the gay sub-cultures of cities like New York, Brighton and Sydney, what the new freedoms meant for him and others in the following decades. He writes honestly and movingly about his teenage attraction to risk and danger; of accidents and escapes; of curiosity as a flight from boredom; of suicidal depression and ecstasy; and, beneath all, of the life of desire haunted and torn by loss.For more than thirty years Jonathan Dollimore has been one of contemporary culture's most influential critics of politics, literature, and sexuality. Desire: A Memoir, a hybrid of autobiography, meditation and philosophical reflection, explores the existential sources of his writing.

Recenzje

A meditation in the form of a memoir. Rather than a chronological account of Dollimore's life, the narrative is fragmentary, held together by a constant need to unravel the meanings of desire and surmount episodes of deep depression . Dollimore is a fine and intelligent writer who combines personal reminiscences with philosophical musings in ways that stretch the reader . The book ends with an homage to a now dead friend and a sense that in grief there is a renewed desire for life, a fitting conclusion to a book that's both emotionally and intellectually rewarding. The Gay & Lesbian Review

Spis treści

Preface 1. Life-Changing Accident 2. Loss and Change 3. Life-Changing Wager 4. New York: City of Many Sirens 5. 'Death Is In My Sight Today" - 1990-1 6. On Loss 7. Sydney, 1988 8. Reckonings 9. Oblivion and Touch (1991) Index

O autorze

Dollimore, Jonathan
Jonathan Dollimore has held professorships at the universities of Sussex and York and lectured and taught throughout the world. He was co-founder (with Alan Sinfield) of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence at the University of Sussex. His landmark works include Radical Tragedy (1984), Political Shakespeare (with Alan Sinfield,1985), Sexual Dissidence (1991), Death Desire and Loss in Western Culture (1998) and Sex, Literature and Censorship (2001).