Scope and Contents

The primary focus of this essay is the forms of reading proposed by contemporary, commercial magazines and books, with consideration of related concepts in pop music and electronic media. It raises the question of what it means to read and interpret when the parameters of visual and verbal signs and contexts are transient and mutable. Zelevansky asks "what does scanning, sampling, hypermedia, etc. mean for the creators and consumers of books destined for the new electronic superstore? The future of the book form is entwined with the future of reading." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents The jacket design was done by Richard Eckersley.Diane Davis Amazon.com. Avital Ronell is one of the most provocative, street-savvy, and theoretically sophisticated thinkers of this age. If you've not yet encountered her explosive work (her other books: Dictations, The Telephone Book, Crack Wars, Finitude's Score), Stupidity will most definitely blow you away. And if you are already a die-hard Ronell fan, Stupidity will ... blow you away. (No amount of prep will brace you sufficiently.) Like Ronell's other works, Stupidity offers a kind of post-critical or nonrepresentational analysis, going after a seemingly recognizable and knowable signifier (stupidity) but tracking it so closely that it quickly becomes unrecognizable, exceeding its object-status, overflowing itself as a concept. Explicitly breaking with scholarly tradition, a tradition that over-values mastery and certitude, Ronell engages her "object" of study at the level of its radical singularity, tracking it through poets,...