.... But this gap is also productive of black social life, constructed in part because of the tension inside of this slippage and certainly in relation to it. “A Black Poetics: Against Mastery” proposes that creation and innovation emerge from the impossibility of knowing one's black self and that a black poetics...

... bourgeois pedagogy. Departing from the Kantian concept of pedagogy, already the younger Benjamin criticizes humanist teleologies of child education. Unraveling the aporias of bourgeois pedagogy, he takes hierarchical oppositions, such as civilization and nature, mind and body, teacher and student, mastery...

... is being newly and otherwise constructed than it is in peoples and families” (1981: 147).5 The basis of Benjamin’s claim is found in an analogical presentation of the nature of technology: Mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of tech- nology. But who would want...

... power. Yet, even in this exigency, it makes possible a suspension of customary frameworks. Near the end of One-­Way Street, Benjamin writes, “The mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery...

... and the internal has no slaves. The key question becomes, and I will return to this below, whether it is desirable that the “internal,” having no slaves, becomes a house of masters to ourselves. It is a key question because one may suspect that the survival of self-mastery may just be a microreplica...

... be tactfully set aside—namely, the instability and provisional quality of much of what passes for “mastery, autonomy, and control” in the modern world. If “underground” acquires connotations of both metamorphosis and unknowability, so, too, then, especially after reading “Memories of My Grandmother,” does...

... people. This leads Benjamin to another reference to pedagogy: The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education...

... to education” even though they can never themselves be cultured. Those who pursue the education of the “stupid, dull masses” and “regard as their goal the emancipation of the masses from the mastery of the great few” therefore seek to overthrow the most sacred hierarchy in the kingdom of the intellect...

..., Straus and Giroux), and points to the ignominy of his device when writers, scientists, and activists are being persecuted around the world. Beyond the rhetorical mastery and formal intelligence, it is the complexity and tension of the feelings involved that make “Recantorium” such a powerful piece...

... and seems to open space to endless elusive attempts at mastery (as it does in Erik’s torture chamber, and—Benjamin indicates—in the broad perspective of Haussmann’s panoptical construction of Paris). For the truth contained...

...- bilities, the disabled text has a disabling (disarming!) effect on hierarchies of reading and scholarship, inviting the reader, scholar, even the translator to move into a space where there may be no mastery, where fluency itself is a proximate and contingent affair. This effect is perfectly evident...

... . Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press . Frank Joseph . (1963) 1968 . “ Spatial Form in Modern Literature ” ( 1945 ). In The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature , 3 – 62 . Bloomington : Indiana University Press . Frank Joseph . 1976 . Dostoevsky: The Seeds...

... in the epistemological orders of white mastery. While seemingly at the seat of slave labor and white property ownership, Negro music also appeared to exceed those legal and social markers and claims. Its fundamental excess related directly to the slaves’ status as property that had seemingly come Douglass...

... change from the status quo ante. Still, his concep- tual apparatus could not accommodate the political reality of world-ocean mastery, the acknowledged goal of first Portuguese, then Dutch, then British naval policy, a goal that was fully consonant with the Grotian mare liberum. Genealogies...

..., Jonathan D. Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South. Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Martinson, Deborah. In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Mazor, Yair. The Poetry of Asher Reich: Portrait...

... as a category becomes a veritable species in modernity is to pinpoint the moment when technology ceases to be merely instrumen- tal to the human and becomes productive/destructive of the human: tech- nology [as] the mastery not of nature but of the relation between nature and the human (487). Benjamin s...

... experiments and mastery of form and meter. Which traditions are deemed Brooks's rightful inheritance as a Black woman and poet? The prepublication critical response to the Annie Allen manuscript was mixed. In March 1948, Brooks submitted the manuscript to her editor, Elizabeth Lawrence, at Harper...

... and theories from The Arcades Project and doubtful of Benjamin’s mastery of Marx. But he nevertheless finds central to the later sections of The Arcades Project a strong sense of the unavoidable force of abstract labor power, exchange...

... of the ethical depends on the sense of infinite and so traumatic demand, does not sublimation threaten to erase just what makes ethics so important in the first place? In effect, sublimation threatens to aestheticize the ethical—and in so doing destroy heteronomy and afford illusions of mastery...

... tasks of apperception, for successful reception in distraction presupposes that a mastery of certain tasks has become habitual. What is at stake here, it would seem, is a dialectical mode of reading that effec- 6808 boundar tively masters...