BiblioVault - Books about Mind, Body, Spirit

Back to the Dance Itself

Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance

Edited with Essays by Sondra Fraleigh

University of Illinois Press, 2018

In Back to the Dance Itself, Sondra Fraleigh edits essays that illuminate how scholars apply a range of phenomenologies to explore questions of dance and the world; performing life and language; body and place; and self-knowing in performance. Some authors delve into theoretical perspectives, while others relate personal experiences and reflections that reveal fascinating insights arising from practice. Collectively, authors give particular consideration to the interactive lifeworld of making and doing that motivates performance. Their texts and photographs study body and the environing world through points of convergence, as correlates in elemental and constant interchange modeled vividly in dance. Selected essays on eco-phenomenology and feminism extend this view to the importance of connections with, and caring for, all life.

Contributors: Karen Barbour, Christine Bellerose, Robert Bingham, Kara Bond, Hillel Braude, Sondra Fraleigh, Kimerer LaMothe, Joanna McNamara, Vida Midgelow, Ami Shulman, and Amanda Williamson.

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Beauty, Wonder, and the Mystical Mind

WILSON VAN DUSEN

Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 1999

Beauty, Wonder, and the Mystical Mind spreads before the reader a rich word picture of the spiritual realm. Wilson Van Dusen describes the mature mystic, enumerating the characteristics of those whose lives are shaped by the experience of God. He explains how religion fits within the context of culture and how mysticism fits -- or does not -- within the context of religion. He also compares the mystical to the aesthetic, noting the similar ways in which art and epiphany move and elevate the experiencer.

Believing that all have the potential to experience God, Van Dusen opens the mystical realm to the reader with his warm and accessible style. Writing from lifelong personal experience in the spiritual dimension, he offers a singular interpretation of the history of major religions and their regard for mysticism.

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Between the Living and the Dead

A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age

Éva Pócs

Central European University Press, 1998

Éva Pócs, one of the most highly respected scholars of historical anthropology, has undertaken extensive research on the history of folk beliefs connected with communication and the supernatural sphere. In this book, she examines the relics of European shamanism in early modern sources, and the techniques and belief-systems of mediators found in the records of witchcraft trials from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The book explores the various communication systems known to early modern Hungarians, describes the role of these systems in everyday village life, and shows how they were connected to contemporary European systems, as well as new types of mediators and systems which function right up to the twentieth century. Representing a major contribution to the most up-to-date international research, Eva Pócs draws on significant East European material and literature not previously co-ordinated with that from the West.

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Beyond Brick and Bone

A True Ghost Story

Antoinette M. Schippers

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2020

In this supernatural memoir, the author shares her true story of growing up in a house of spirits, learning to co-exist with those spirits as a child, then channeling the story of those spirits as an adult--as a Gatekeeper. A fascinating tale of a family and their multi-generational home--a home that harbors explosive secrets from a volatile period in Chicago history.

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The Blind Masseuse

A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia

Alden Jones

University of Wisconsin Press, 2017

Through personal journeys both interior and across the globe, Alden Jones investigates what motivates us to travel abroad in search of the unfamiliar.

By way of explorations to Costa Rica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Burma, Cambodia, Egypt, and around the world on a ship, Jones chronicles her experience as a young American traveler while pondering her role as an outsider in the cultures she temporarily inhabits. Her wanderlust fuels a strong, high-adventure story and, much in the vein of classic travel literature, Jones's picaresque tale of personal evolution informs her own transitions, rites of passage, and understandings of her place as a citizen of the world. With sharp insight and stylish prose, Jones asks: Is there a right or wrong way to travel? The Blind Masseuse concludes that there is, but that it's not always black and white.

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The Blind Masseuse

A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia

Alden Jones

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

Through personal journeys both interior and across the globe, Alden Jones investigates what motivates us to travel abroad in search of the unfamiliar.

By way of explorations to Costa Rica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Burma, Cambodia, Egypt, and around the world on a ship, Jones chronicles her experience as a young American traveler while pondering her role as an outsider in the cultures she temporarily inhabits. Her wanderlust fuels a strong, high-adventure story and, much in the vein of classic travel literature, Jones's picaresque tale of personal evolution informs her own transitions, rites of passage, and understandings of her place as a citizen of the world. With sharp insight and stylish prose, Jones asks: Is there a right or wrong way to travel? The Blind Masseuse concludes that there is, but that it's not always black and white.

Gold Winner for Travel Essays, Foreword Books of the Year

Gold Medal for Travel Essays, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Winner, Bisexual Book Awards, Bisexual Biography/Memoir Category

Finalist, Housatonic Book Awards

Longlist of eight, PEN/Diamonstein Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Finalist, Travel Book or Guide Award, North American Travel Journalists Association

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Body Story

Julia K. De Pree

Ohio University Press, 2004

Something other than a memoir of a life well lived, Body Story conveys Julia K. De Pree's troubling journey from adolescence to adulthood and from anorexia to health.

For De Pree, between being a girl and being a woman, there was starvation. Body Story is her intimate account of girlhood, virginity, anorexia, and motherhood. De Pree's prose is spare and unguarded, revealing in vivid flashbacks and poignant vignettes the sources of her inner pain.

In high school, the five-foot-ten De Pree weighed as little as 114 pounds. She was too weak to raise her arms above her head. “In a paradoxical way, I starved my body in order to understand my life,” she writes. “I had to place my body in suspension before I could move physically into sexuality. Starving allowed me to create an interim space between innocence and experience.”

De Pree renders the starkness of anorexia along with the process of recovery, relapse, and, ultimately, redemption. She also tells the story of the physical landscape, from her origins in the Midwest to the American South, Paris, and the vast New Mexican desert, as well as the psychic landscape of her body as it encounters the joys and challenges of maturation, childbirth, and motherhood.

De Pree offers readers a new way of understanding women¿s bodily experience, as she writes about the mystery and the meaning of her illness. As many as eight million Americans suffer from eating disorders. Body Story, unlike clinical reports or news accounts, illuminates the complexity of anorexia as the narrative moves toward a subjective and deeply personal truth.

This evocative and often radiant vision is a unique window into womanhood and selfhood in middle-class, contemporary America.

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Bruja

A Dreamoir

Wendy C. Ortiz

Northwestern University Press, 2025

The dreamscape of a haunted and hopeful woman, back in print

Dubbed a “dreamoir,” Bruja is a bold and harrowing journey through the dream worlds of Wendy C. Ortiz. Sister memoir to Hollywood Notebook, it catalogs the happenings of the night: strange visions of the past warped by present-day inklings; animals running loose, never where they should be; familiar nature and architecture made malleable and new. Ortiz’s subconscious is bared in full on these pages as the author interrogates her histories. We bravely adventure into new literary form, walking the parallel plane of Ortiz’s waking life alongside her. Where the self is anchored in the deepest recesses of the mind, Ortiz invites us to push the boundaries of the subconscious and enter into the dreamoir.

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Building Bodies

Moore, Pamela L

Rutgers University Press, 1997

Building Bodies is an exciting collection of articles that strive toward constructing theoretical models in which power, bodies, discourse, and subjectivity interact in a space we can call the "built" body, a dynamic, politicized, and biological site. Contributors discuss the complex relationship between body building and masculinity, between the built body and the racialized body, representations of women body builders in print and in film, and homoeroticism in body building. Linked by their focus on the sport and practice of body building, the authors in this volume challenge both the way their various disciplines (media studies, literary criticism, gender studies, film and sociology) have gone about studying bodies, and existing assumptions about the complex relationship between power, subjectivity, society, and flesh. Body building--in practice, in representation, and in the cultural imagination--serves as an launching point because the sport and practice provide ready challenges to existing assumptions about the "built" body.

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