Denise Riley – författare

An attempt to explore the idea that there are historical sedimentations of people into gendered categories, including the asymmetrical distances of both "women" and "men" from changing ideas of the human; the increasing saturation, from the late seventeenth century, of women with their sex; and the nineteenth century elisions between "the social" and "women". It is argued that feminism cannot but play out the inescapable indeterminacy of "women" whether consciously or not, and that this is made plain in its oscillations, since the 1790s, between concepts of equality and of difference.;The author maintains that a full recognition of the ambiguity of the category of "women" is not a semantic doubt, but a condition for an effective feminist political philosophy.

An attempt to explore the idea that there are historical sedimentations of people into gendered categories, including the asymmetrical distances of both "women" and "men" from changing ideas of the human; the increasing saturation, from the late seventeenth century, of women with their sex; and the nineteenth century elisions between "the social" and "women". It is argued that feminism cannot but play out the inescapable indeterminacy of "women" whether consciously or not, and that this is made plain in its oscillations, since the 1790s, between concepts of equality and of difference. The author maintains that a full recognition of the ambiguity of the category of "women" is not a semantic doubt, but a condition for an effective feminist political philosophy.

This is no academic survey, but an unique and widely-ranging collection of essays and some related poems by almost thirty contemporary poets, distinguished by their energy and thoughtfulness, who have worked for years outside the 'mainstream' of British publishing. Many are or have been small-press publishers and editors too. This engaging and lively book will serve as an introduction to the work of some fine writers, as it details how they understand the working processes of poetry.

The titles in the series "Language, Discourse, Society" range across the disciplines from linguistics to biology, from literary criticism to law, combining vigorous scholarship and theoretical analysis at the service of a broad political engagement. This 25th anniversary reader brings together a group of thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic with an introductory overview from the editors which considers the development of theory and scholarship since 1980.

The titles in the series "Language, Discourse, Society" range across the disciplines from linguistics to biology, from literary criticism to law, combining vigorous scholarship and theoretical analysis at the service of a broad political engagement. This 25th anniversary reader brings together a group of thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic with an introductory overview from the editors which considers the development of theory and scholarship since 1980.

Marlene Dietrich had the last line in Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil: "What does it matter what you say about other people?" The author ponders the question: What does it matter what you say about yourself? She wonders why the requirement to be a something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own subject. She decides that some hesitations and awkwardness in inhabiting many categories of the person—including those celebrated by what is sometimes termed identity politics—need not evidence either psychological weakness or political lack of nerve.Neither an "identity" nor a "nonidentity" can quite convince. But if this discomfort inhering in self-characterization needs to be fully admitted and registered—as something that is simultaneously linguistic and affective—it can also be cheerfully tolerated. Here language is not treated as a guileful thing that leads its speakers astray. Though the business of being called something, and of being positioned by that calling, is often an unhappy affair, irony can offer effective therapy. Even if uncertain and volatile categorizations do trouble the politics that they also shape, they hardly weaken the empathetic solidarity that is distinct from identification. The verbal irony of self-presentation can be politically helpful. Questioning the received diction of the self cannot be dismissed merely as a luxury of those in secure positions, but instead can move toward a conception of a constructive nonidentity.This extended meditation on the language of the self within contemporary social politics also considers the lyrical "I" and linguistic emotionality, the historical status of irony, and the possibilities of a nonidentitarian solidarity that is unapologetically alert to the affect of language.

Marlene Dietrich had the last line in Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil: "What does it matter what you say about other people?" The author ponders the question: What does it matter what you say about yourself? She wonders why the requirement to be a something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own subject. She decides that some hesitations and awkwardness in inhabiting many categories of the person—including those celebrated by what is sometimes termed identity politics—need not evidence either psychological weakness or political lack of nerve.Neither an "identity" nor a "nonidentity" can quite convince. But if this discomfort inhering in self-characterization needs to be fully admitted and registered—as something that is simultaneously linguistic and affective—it can also be cheerfully tolerated. Here language is not treated as a guileful thing that leads its speakers astray. Though the business of being called something, and of being positioned by that calling, is often an unhappy affair, irony can offer effective therapy. Even if uncertain and volatile categorizations do trouble the politics that they also shape, they hardly weaken the empathetic solidarity that is distinct from identification. The verbal irony of self-presentation can be politically helpful. Questioning the received diction of the self cannot be dismissed merely as a luxury of those in secure positions, but instead can move toward a conception of a constructive nonidentity.This extended meditation on the language of the self within contemporary social politics also considers the lyrical "I" and linguistic emotionality, the historical status of irony, and the possibilities of a nonidentitarian solidarity that is unapologetically alert to the affect of language.

Denise Riley is renowned as a feminist theorist and a poet and for her remarkable refiguring of familiar but intransigent problems of identity, expression, language, and politics. In Impersonal Passion, she turns to everyday complex emotional and philosophical problems of speaking and listening. Her provocative meditations suggest that while the emotional power of language is impersonal, this impersonality paradoxically constitutes the personal. In nine linked essays, Riley deftly unravels the rhetoric of life’s absurdities and urgencies, its comforts and embarrassments, to insist on the forcible affect of language itself. She teases out the emotional complexities of such quotidian matters as what she ironically terms the right to be lonely in the face of the imperative to be social or the guilt associated with feeling as if you’re lying when you aren’t. Impersonal Passion reinvents questions from linguistics, the philosophy of language, and cultural theory in an illuminating new idiom: the compelling emotion of the language of the everyday.

Denise Riley is renowned as a feminist theorist and a poet and for her remarkable refiguring of familiar but intransigent problems of identity, expression, language, and politics. In Impersonal Passion, she turns to everyday complex emotional and philosophical problems of speaking and listening. Her provocative meditations suggest that while the emotional power of language is impersonal, this impersonality paradoxically constitutes the personal. In nine linked essays, Riley deftly unravels the rhetoric of life’s absurdities and urgencies, its comforts and embarrassments, to insist on the forcible affect of language itself. She teases out the emotional complexities of such quotidian matters as what she ironically terms the right to be lonely in the face of the imperative to be social or the guilt associated with feeling as if you’re lying when you aren’t. Impersonal Passion reinvents questions from linguistics, the philosophy of language, and cultural theory in an illuminating new idiom: the compelling emotion of the language of the everyday.

‘One of the most eloquent thinkers about our life in language’ – The Sunday TimesA Chorus of Ears is a series of essays on voice, lyric and the persona of the poet from one of our greatest living English poets. Denise Riley contemplates how a poet's public persona can hold more significance than their actual poetry in the modern literary world. She reflects on how prize culture can transform criticism into a beauty contest, and limit our ability to meet the lyric on its own terms.What might be discovered, Riley asks, if we liberate the poem from the person of the author? From where does its own voice spring? In allowing the poem to speak, what might we hear?Including a foreword by leading poet and critic Don Paterson.'One of the great poets of our time ' – New Statesman

A brilliant outing from one of the finest poets currently working in the English language. This is at once a sharply political and deeply personal book which explores just that intersection.‘Wide-ranging, sometimes anguished, her poems are fascinating and often beautiful, and certainly more than usually thought-provoking’ Guardian