nvrrrdie's reviews
52 reviews

Rich storytelling and good characters with emotional depth. Complex intergenerational relationships.

Much to think about. Interesting as a contemporary political allegory.

Textual misogyny is obviously an issue but many other takes on it seem too reductive for me to fully grant. The condition of women in religiously uptight pseudo-historical Salem and their expression of forbidden behaviours as well as who is considered implicated in guilt all make interesting subtext.

Very difficult text for me right now. Definitely something that needs time and study and digestion. Extremely dense not in the sense that it's dry and trudging but it's just so packed with message in every sentence and in a way that's beyond my level right now.

P.S. very relieved after reading these reviews to see I was not the only person fighting for my life to interpret this. I think my issue is that I'm not emerged deeply enough yet in sci-tech and more advanced philosophy.

Was introduced this years ago through a class about media, information, and technology and I'm pretty mad that they mentioned gender as a side note when it was actually the entire point and premise of the text.

Reflections, notes, keywords:
- Human animality, breaching culture/nature boundary
- Innocence of nature - being pure and separate and naturalized, nonconstructed + nonconceived (<<< questionable)
- Naming is an exclusive act and brings consciousness to contradiction and partiality and choice
- Gender, race, class do not have essential unity (they defy to be essentialized and reducible to universal meaning) specifically in light of "the matrix of women's dominations of each other" therefore bring attention to affinities rather than essences
- Identities destabilize as their opposites are deconstructed (orient/occident)
 - Women's non-innocence of dominations
- Consciousness (of identity and location) are achievement and not a natural fact <<< construction and epistemologies
- Subjectivity of postmodern identity rather than objectivity, based on history and a changing world order where the network of connections between people are multiple and complex 
- Polyvocality
- Feminized labour: made vulnerable and exploited 
- Cross-gender, cross-race alliances for survival, new webs of power = new coalitions 
- Changes in world order largely impacted by post-war arms race (human components adapted in cultural machinery towards this purpose?? political economical landscape??)
- Adapt and reconstruct to survive using the tools which marked you as other
- "Recognize oneself as fully implicated in the world"
- Reciprocity, shaping. We make and we are made. In terms of the world network and biotics and stuff. Cyborg.
- Prosthetics. Having social prostheses and containing externalities in our reality
- The machine is us - nuclear weapons and war machinery: not independent objects but in tandem with us and our embodiments

I can't really review this. It was more graphic than I could really handle and I still forced myself to read it, I don't think it was worth it to me. I really wanted to finish it because it was spoken of so highly as literature, and I think I can understand why, Butler's world is a strong and interesting one but I can't really judge this book objectively.

This book is an opinion piece which aims to respond to propaganda and rhetoric about white poverty in Appalachia. It is supported by broad historical information about labour uprising and resource exploitation in the region. It connects the struggles of Appalachians to struggles across the USA throughout history and also highlights the dubious bases of classist rhetoric of poverty. In my opinion, it does all of that pretty well.

Useful and a great resource, but I don't have the time right now for this kind of dedicated study.

I have no doubt that Virginia Woolf is an intelligent and contemplative writer. I think this book is of historical interest about theory related to opportunity, poverty, and success and the changing position of Englishwomen in society, and that this text was a very early contribution to a field that has since grown extremely more wide and deep. However I dreaded reading this and found the style very hard to parse. Overall it did not leave much of an impression on me and I will likely find more benefit from later generations of writing.

Very thorough and informative. This is something I will need to come back to because I have to admit it is above my current reading level. 

I'm just really not interested in the writing or in the world presented by the book. Also the preachiness of the utopian image