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Understanding Will Self introduces readers to the satire and expressive ingenuity of a British writer who has garnered an array of awards since the 1991 publication of his first short story collection, The Quantity Theory of Sanity. In this guide to the well-received but largely unstudied writer, M. Hunter Hayes examines the key themes, narrative strategies, and cultural commentaries that characterize Self's work. Through close textual analyses, Hayes guides readers through the alternative universe of Self's writing and maps the interplay between his forays into journalism and fiction. Marked by their combination of seemingly improbable events and quotidian details, Self's novels, novellas, and short stories examine contemporary English life through a mode of writing that he has aptly termed dirty magical realism. Hayes shows how recurring characters have evolved through successive works and in relation with their environments.
In this politically and democratically urgent collection, George Yancy and contributors argue that more than ever, we are in need of classrooms that function "dangerously"—that is, classrooms where people are not afraid to engage in critical discussions that call into question difficult political times. Collectively they demonstrate the ways activist authors and scholars must be prepared to engage in risk and vulnerability as a defense of our democratic right to practice forms of pedagogical transgression. Ideal for scholars and students of critical pedagogy, philosophy of education, and political theory, this collection delineates the necessity of critical consciousness through education, and provides ways of speaking back against authoritarian control of imaginative and critical capacities.