A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Merging cultural analysis and literary scholarship, this compelling work moves from a consideration of how cultural forces shaped literary production and political activism to a close examination of how fictional representations of contraception influenced the terms of public discourse on marriage, motherhood, economics, and eugenics.
By analyzing popular fiction such as Mother by Kathleen Norris, radical periodicals such as The Masses and Birth Control Review, and literature by authors from Theodore Dreiser to William Faulkner, and Nella Larsen to Mary McCarthy, Beth Widmaier Capo reveals the rich cross-influence of contraceptive and literary history.
The fruit of more than three decades of research
This collection of fourteen essays by Eberhard W. Güting covers important aspects of editorial science with a particular focus on New Testament textual criticism. Essays cover textual emendation, text-critical procedures, literary criticism, history of scholarship, advantages and disadvantages of online manuscripts, and text-critical studies of words and phrases. The addition of a substantial introduction to text criticism makes this a valuable resource for students and teachers.
Features
- Essays concerned with establishing the original text of New Testament writings
- Nine essays published in English for the first tim
- Two previously unpublished essays
Invaluable to the new pedagogical field of “writing across the curriculum,” Textual Dynamics of the Professions is also a significant intervention into the studies of rhetoric, writing theory, and the sociology of knowledge.
Katherine Storm Hindley explores words at their most powerful: words that people expected would physically change the world. Medieval Europeans often resorted to the use of spoken or written charms to ensure health or fend off danger. Hindley draws on an unprecedented archive of more than a thousand such charms from medieval England—more than twice the number gathered, transcribed, and edited in previous studies and including many texts still unknown to specialists on this topic. Focusing on charms from 1100 to 1350 CE as well as previously unstudied texts in Latin, French, and English, Hindley addresses important questions of how people thought about language, belief, and power. She describes seven hundred years of dynamic, shifting cultural landscapes, where multiple languages, alphabets, and modes of transmission gained and lost their protective and healing power. Where previous scholarship has bemoaned a lack of continuity in the English charms, Hindley finds surprising links between languages and eras, all without losing sight of the extraordinary variety of the medieval charm tradition: a continuous, deeply rooted part of the English Middle Ages.
Textual Rivals studies some of the most debated issues in Herodotean scholarship. One such is Herodotus’ self-presentation: the conspicuousness of his authorial persona is one of the most remarkable features of his Histories. So frequently does he interject first-person comments into the narrative that Herodotus at times almost becomes a character within his own text.
Important issues are tied to Herodotus’ self-presentation. First is the narrator’s relationship to truth: to what extent does he expect readers to trust his narrative? While judgments regarding Herodotus’ overall veracity have often been damning, scholars have begun to concentrate on how Herodotus presents his truthfulness. Second is the precise genre Herodotus means to create with his work. Excluding the anachronistic term historian, exactly what would Herodotus have called himself, as author? Third is the presence of “self-referential” characters, whose actions often mirror Herodotus’ as narrator/researcher, in the Histories.
David Branscome’s investigative text points to the rival inquirers in Herodotus’ Histories as a key to unraveling these interpretive problems. The rival inquirers are self-referential characters Herodotus uses to further his authorial self-presentation. Through the contrast Herodotus draws between his own exacting standards as an inquirer and the often questionable standards of those rivals, Herodotus underlines just how truthful readers should find his own work.
Textual Rivals speaks to those interested in Greek history and historiography, narratology, and ethnography. Those in the growing ranks of Herodotus fans will find much to invite and intrigue.
A fresh look at the development of Paul’s argument in Romans
The Greek word gar occurs 144 times in Romans and 1,041 times in the entire New Testament. However, many instances of this connective defy easy definition, and the English translation for is often inadequate, obscuring the clue that gar gives to the direction of the communicator’s thought. In this ground-breaking work, Sarah H. Casson argues that gar offers vital guidance to the coherence of Romans. The book applies the cognitive approach of relevance theory to show how garfunctions as an indispensable guide for tracing the significant points of Paul’s argument, helping resolve questions about the coherence of sections, as well as smaller-scale exegetical problems. The work engages with key debates regarding the purpose of Romans and challenges some recent influential interpretations.
Features:
- An exegetically useful understanding of the connective gar
- A new method for determining Paul’s audience and reason for writing
- A challenge to recent key debates and influential interpretations of the purpose of Romans
Holocaust texts, which encompass works as diverse as memoirs, novels, poems, and diaries, are traditionally characterized by silences the authors place throughout the text, both deliberately and unconsciously. While a reader may have the desire and will to comprehend the Holocaust, the presence of “textual silence” is a force that removes the experience of genocide from the reader’s analysis and imaginative recourse. Lang defines silences as omissions that take many forms, including the use of italics and quotation marks, ellipses and blank pages in poetry, and the presence of unreliable narrators in fiction. While this limits the reader’s ability to read in any conventional sense, these silences are not flaws. They are instead a critical presence that forces readers to acknowledge how words and meaning can diverge in the face of events as unimaginable as those of the Holocaust.
"The texts . . . which are drawn from over two thousand years of history, are usefully divided, annotated and glossed. They enable students to explore the tradition in a new way [and] give a marvellous insight into the richness and liveliness of the Jewish religion and culture: we are given wit and pathos in addition to popular story and religious law."—Janet Trotter, Resource
"Wide-ranging. . . . An indispensable one-volume collection of primary materials."—William R. Darrow, Religious Studies Review
Tim Hunt’s The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose examines Kerouac’s work from a new critical perspective with a focus on the author’s unique methods of creating and working with text. Additionally, The Textuality of Soulwork delineates Kerouac’s development of “Spontaneous Prose” to differentiate the preliminary experiment of On the Road from the more radical experiment of Visions of Cody, and to demonstrate Kerouac’s transition from working within the textual paradigm of modern print to the textual paradigm of secondary orality. From these perspectives, Tim Hunt crafts a new critical approach to Beat poetics and textual theory, marking an important contribution to the current revival of Kerouac and Beat studies underway at universities in the U.S. and abroad, as reflected by a growing number of conferences, courses, and a renewal in scholarship.
Jody Benjamin analyzes a range of archival, visual, oral, and material sources drawn from three continents to illuminate entanglements between local textile industries and global commerce and between the politics of Islamic reform and encroaching European colonial power. The study highlights the roles of a diverse range of historical actors mentioned only glancingly in core-periphery or Atlantic-centered framings: women indigo dyers, maroon cotton farmers, petty traveling merchants, caravan guides, and African Diaspora settlers. It argues that their combined choices within a set of ecological, political, and economic constraints structured networks connecting the Atlantic and Indian Ocean perimeters.
Essays that point to the emergence of a critical humanist geography.
Geography/ Cultural Studies
Essays that point to the emergence of a critical humanist geography.A fresh and far-ranging interpretation of the concept of place, this volume begins with a fundamental tension of our day: as communications technologies help create a truly global economy, the very political-economic processes that would seem to homogenize place actually increase the importance of individual localities, which are exposed to global flows of investment, population, goods, and pollution. Place, no less today than in the past, is fundamental to how the world works.The contributors to this volume-distinguished scholars from geography, art history, philosophy, anthropology, and American and English literature-investigate the ways in which place is embedded in everyday experience, its crucial role in the formation of group and individual identity, and its ability to reflect and reinforce power relations. Their essays draw from a wide array of methodologies and perspectives-including feminism, ethnography, poststructuralism, ecocriticism, and landscape iconography-to examine themes as diverse as morality and imagination, attention and absence, personal and group identity, social structure, home, nature, and cosmos. Contributors: Anne Buttimer, U College Dublin; Edward S. Casey, SUNY Stony Brook; Denis Cosgrove, UCLA; Tim Cresswell, U of Wales, Aberystwyth; Michael Curry, UCLA; Dydia DeLyser, Louisiana State U; James S. Duncan, U of Cambridge; Nancy G. Duncan, U of Cambridge; J. Nicholas Entrikin, UCLA; William Howarth, Princeton U; John Paul Jones III, U of Kentucky; David Ley, U of British Columbia; David Lowenthal, U College London; Karal Ann Marling, U of Minnesota; Patrick McGreevy, Clarion U; Kenneth R. Olwig, U of Trondheim, Norway; Marijane Osborn, UC Davis; Gillian R. Overing, Wake Forest U; Edward Relph, U of Toronto; Miles Richardson, Louisiana State U; Robert D. Sack, U of Wisconsin-Madison; Jonathan M. Smith, Texas A&M U; Yi-Fu Tuan, U of Wisconsin-Madison; April R. Veness, U of Delaware; and Wilbur Zelinsky, Pennsylvania State U.ISBN 0-8166-3756-3 Cloth £45.00 $64.95xxISBN 0-8166-3757-1 Paper £18.00 $25.95x576 Pages 34 black-and-white photos, 1 table 7 x 10 FebruaryTranslation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
What do we mean when we say, "I made the time pass more quickly," or, "I’m creating some ‘me’ time"? InThe Textures of Time, Michael Flaherty examines how we alter or customize our experience of time. His detailed analysis reveals different strategies we use to try to manipulate time, further describing and defining those strategies within six discrete time categories: Duration, Frequency, Sequence, Timing, Allocation, and Taking Time.
Using in-depth interviews and analyzing responses through a sociological lens, Flaherty unearths folk theories and practices, which he calls "time work," that construct circumstances in order to provoke desired forms of temporal experience. As such, time is not justinflicted on us; rather, its various textures result from our intervention, and/or from our efforts to create different forms of temporal experience. These first-person accounts also highlight ongoing tensions between agency and determinism in social groups. Ultimately, in keeping with his central thesis, Flaherty's lucid prose make this book a quick read, and the strategies he describes reveal the profound and inventive ways we "manage the clock."
The interlocking complexities of Tezcatlipoca’s nature, multiple roles, and metaphorical attributes illustrate the extent to which his influence penetrated Aztec belief and social action across all levels of late Postclassic central Mexican culture. Tezcatlipoca examines the results of archaeological investigations—objects like obsidian mirrors, gold, bells, public stone monuments, and even a mosaic skull—and reveals new insights into the supreme deity of the Aztec pantheon and his role in Aztec culture.
Mills describes the environments from which these women left, as well as the urban landscape they now call home. Hence, she examines key aspects of rural Thai community life, such as local consumption practices, gender roles, and the familial tensions that are often the catalyst to labor migration. Then she focuses on the city and the underlying tensions of urban employment as migrants pursue newly imagined identities as modern women, while still upholding economic and moral responsibilities to rural kin.
Tourist brochures and travel guides depict Thailand as an exotic country with a rich cultural heritage, strong religious traditions, and a popular monarchy. Historians also contribute to Thailand’s international allure with chronicles of its unique historical and cultural continuity in comparison to the other southeast Asian countries, whose histories are stained by colonialism and nationalist struggles for independence.
Thailand challenges these stereotypes with a reinterpretation as well as an introduction to the emergence of Thailand as a nation-state. The book argues that the development of Thai nationhood was a long-term process shaped by interactions with the outside world, its pursuit of civilization, and, more recently, globalization. Maurizio Peleggi’s original account investigates, among other issues, the evolution of the geographical and linguistic landscapes, changes in class and gender relations, the role of institutions and ideologies, modern cultural expressions, social memory, and the conception of the Thai national self as contrasted against the racial and cultural Others of Burmese, Chinese and Westerners.
Thailandis a concise and compelling introduction to the complexities that lie behind Thailand’s exotic facade.
When a populist movement elected Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister of Thailand in 2001, many of the country’s urban elite dismissed the outcome as just another symptom of rural corruption, a traditional patronage system dominated by local strongmen pressuring their neighbors through political bullying and vote-buying. In Thailand’s Political Peasants, however, Andrew Walker argues that the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic dynamic has dramatically changed the relations of Thai peasants with the state, making them a political force to be reckoned with. Whereas their ancestors focused on subsistence, this generation of middle-income peasants seeks productive relationships with sources of state power, produces cash crops, and derives additional income through non-agricultural work. In the increasingly decentralized, disaggregated country, rural villagers and farmers have themselves become entrepreneurs and agents of the state at the local level, while the state has changed from an extractor of taxes to a supplier of subsidies and a patron of development projects.
Thailand’s Political Peasants provides an original, provocative analysis that encourages an ethnographic rethinking of rural politics in rapidly developing countries. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Ban Tiam, a rural village in northern Thailand, Walker shows how analyses of peasant politics that focus primarily on rebellion, resistance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent forms of political society.
“Although of a relatively scarce breed,” the Arkansas Times observed in the obituary of the itinerant writer it had once employed, “Mike Trimble was Arkansas’s and perhaps the country’s greatest self-deprecating journalist.” Readers will find in this fifty-year inventory of Trimble’s wit and wisdom all the vindication they might seek for that quaint judgment—the rare humble author. Whether he was chronicling, in the 1980s, rising political worthies like the far-into-the-future governors Asa Hutchinson and Mike Beebe, or, more often, the ordinary and feckless people that he encountered every day, befriended, and spent most of his career writing about, Trimble usually found a way, subtly or artlessly, to bring up his own failings, such as identifying the wrong person as the dead woman in an obituary he had written in his earliest days for his first employer, the Texarkana Gazette. Like the yokels in the vaudeville duos Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Rowan and Martin, and Fey and Poehler, Trimble’s confessed bumblings were purposeful and studied instruments of his humor.
Arkansas produced more than its quota of weirdos, fabulists, con men, oleaginous politicians, charlatans, creeps, visionaries, and fantastical creatures—from Albert Pike, Arvin the Wino, Dr. Brinkley the Great Depression’s goat-gland sex therapist, Editor Weston, and the salty riverboat queen Ray Dorthy all the way to Say McIntosh and Red the Irish Setter. Mike Trimble, the South’s best and funniest storyteller, put them all down on paper for some of the best reading since Catch-22. Trimble turned humor into art and history into vaudeville.
Jim Henry's stories defy convention. There are no easy answers, no quick fixes. Although the plots vary—from a corpse returning to visit his family weeks after his burial, to the musings of a congressman grappling with the weight of history, to a wealthy family's elaborate plot to cheer their mysteriously wounded mother—all express a sense of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the absurd in the everyday.
Henry's characters are for the most part misfits, outsiders looking in on a world whose seemingly natural order is turned upside down. In a throw-away culture obsessed with sex and drugs, money and God, they struggle to connect with what is real while trying to convince themselves that anything is. And yet in the midst of their existential searching there remains always Henry's quirky sense of humor. As one character says, “Anything is possible,” and in this collection anything and everything happens.
Everything is subject to a lifecycle. In the field of energy, the obvious question is, “Where are we in the lifecycle of fossil fuels?” Competitive technology for sourcing renewable energy, marketplace readiness, and pressures from climate change all signal that the fossil fuel era is coming to an end. This book explains the alternatives and suggests when and how change will occur. Employing a global perspective and detailed analysis, it provides recommendations on policies and strategies to make a smooth and wholesale transition to renewables before the continued use of fossil fuels becomes economically and socially disruptive.
Gregory Meehan’s overview eschews politics in favor of comprehensive coverage and logical explanation. He addresses economic, environmental, and security concerns and does not shy away from illuminating limitations and problems with various energy sources. Meehan’s dogged pursuit of the current state of knowledge and energy practices around the world shows that different answers are proving viable for different social and environmental contexts. This is the most wide-ranging and thorough introduction to the world’s energy issues and choices to date.
Lecture and exercise guides available upon request.
Click here to hear the Friends of the Marriott Library event with Gregory Meehan. https://youtu.be/YqmNhEN09_c
In 1968, in search of a better world, a young person flees her country and ends up in Switzerland, the land of hard cheese. There she’s told not to talk nonsense, or not to “talk cheese,” as they say in the local dialect. Home is where you can grumble, but here you have to be grateful. Her new environs seem unwieldy, aloof, and she rebels against this host country that insists on her following its rules, that won’t let her be herself. But as an interpreter, she meets many others who have ended up here—petty criminals, depressives, hustlers, refugees, victims of exploitation, and others who have gone out of their way to assimilate, people who share a hope that they can make something new of their lives. Gradually she learns to experience the richness of exile and foreignness, to build bridges between cultures. A brilliantly written novel about the search for identity between assimilation and resistance, Irena Brežná’s The Thankless Foreigner is a significant addition to the important literature of immigrant experience.
Crafted with lines from her late father’s letters, Jennifer Tseng’s Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive is a portrait of an immigrant, a rootless person whose unspoken loss—that of his native geography, family, traditions, language—underlies every word. Though her father’s first language was Mandarin, for more than twenty years he wrote these letters in English, so that she could understand them. Some are riddled with errors, some nearly unintelligible. Lines from his letters appear as titles and are scattered throughout the poems, blending voices of father and daughter. This collection enacts what it means to lose someone and commune with them simultaneously—the paradox of grief and all it gives us.
Lange draws on 152 interviews with YouTube participants at gatherings throughout the United States, content analyses of more than 300 videos, observations of interactions on and off the site, and participant-observation. She documents how the introduction of monetization options impacted perceived opportunities for open sharing and creative exploration of personal and social messages. Lange’s book provides new insight into patterns of digital migration, YouTube’s influence on off-site interactions, and the emotional impact of losing control over images. The book also debunks traditional myths about online interaction, such as the supposed online/offline binary, the notion that anonymity always degrades public discourse, and the popular characterization of online participants as over-sharing narcissists.
YouTubers' experiences illustrate fascinating hybrid forms of contemporary sociality that are neither purely mediated nor sufficient when conducted only in person. Combining intensive ethnography, analysis of video artifacts, and Lange’s personal vlogging experiences, the book explores how YouTubers are creating a posthuman collective characterized by interaction, support, and controversy. In analyzing the tensions between YouTubers' idealistic goals of sociality and the site's need for monetization, Thanks for Watching makes crucial contributions to cultural anthropology, digital ethnography, science and technology studies, new media studies, communication, interaction design, and posthumanism.
For its perceptive analysis of video blogging for self-expression and sociality, Thanks for Watching received the Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression (2020), from the National Communication Association.
Thanos is a young farmer struggling to improve himself despite the derision of his mother, who considers him incapable of bearing arms for his country. She prefers instead her more "heroic" son, the brave and ambitious brigand Tassos, whose courage and resistance to authority embodying the virtues that helped Greece drive out the Turks. While Thanos works his land, his ruthless brother uses the political machinery and wealth gained from robbery and murder to replace the old Ottoman landowners and subjugate the villagers.
In That Could Be Us, Jamieson and Van Belle find that the news media delivers information to observing communities in a form that enables learning from other disasters. Experimental evidence shows that people react to this information in a way that would punish leaders who do not back DRR efforts. Case studies, interviews, experiments, and illustrative examples suggest that leaders and political entrepreneurs heed this public demand, react to news media coverage, and act accordingly. Taken as a whole, this suggests that the policy and research implications derived from this book’s theoretical model are worthy of further exploration, particularly in terms of how they might resolve the puzzle presented by the variations in DRR policy uptake around the world that do not seem to be driven by developmental differences across communities.
In this first book-length biography of Mercedes de Acosta, theatre historian Robert A. Schanke adroitly mines lost archival materials and mixes in his own interviews with de Acosta’s intimates to correct established myths and at last construct an accurate, detailed, and vibrant portrait of the flamboyantly uninhibited early-twentieth-century author, poet, and playwright.
Born to wealthy Spanish immigrants, Mercedes de Acosta (1893–1968) lived in opulence and traveled in the same social circles as the Astors and Vanderbilts. Introduced to the New York theater scene at an early age, her dual loves of performance and of women informed every aspect of her life thereafter. Alice B. Toklas’s observation, “Say what you will about Mercedes, she’s had the most important women in the twentieth century,” was well justified, as her romantic conquests included such internationally renowned beauties as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, and Eva Le Gallienne as well as Alla Nazimova, Tamara Karsavina, Pola Negri, and Ona Munson.
More than a record of her personal life and infamous romances, this account offers the first analysis of the complete oeuvre of de Acosta’s literary works, including three volumes of poetry, two novels, two film scripts, and a dozen plays. Although only two of her plays were ever published during her lifetime, four of them were produced, featuring such stage luminaries as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Eva Le Gallienne. Critics praised her first volume of poetry, Moods, in 1919 and predicted her rise to literary fame, but the love of other women that fueled her writing also limited her opportunities to fulfill this destiny. Failing to achieve any lasting fame, she died in relative poverty at the age of seventy-five.
De Acosta lived her desires publicly with verve and vigor at a time when few others would dare, and for that, she paid the price of marginalized obscurity. Until now. With “That Furious Lesbian” Schanke at last establishes Mercedes de Acosta’s rightful place as a pioneer—and indeed a champion—in the early struggle for lesbian rights in this country.
Robert A. Schanke has edited a companion to this biography, Women in Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta,also available from Southern Illinois University Press.
That Futebol Feeling captures the region’s enthrallment with “the beautiful game,” and shows us how and why play is central to the human condition. David Faflik profiles members of the most celebrated local team, Clube Atlético Mineiro (CAM), as well as its passionate, never-say-die fans, to show how futebol and fandom shape their everyday lives and perspectives. He discovers bonds of work and play, as well as pride, identity, and community. Additionally, Faflik’s analysis of Brazil’s futebol culture reflects sports fandom worldwide.
CAM stands as a symbol for a way of life in Minas Gerais, the birthplace of Pelé. Faflik interrogates what playing the game means to those who dedicate their lives to the sport. He writes, “The feelings that football inspires are the best of me.” That Futebol Feeling shares that special feeling with the rest of us.
Long a symbol of American culture, the banjo actually originated in Africa before European-Americans adopted it. Karen Linn shows how the banjo--despite design innovations and several modernizing agendas--has failed to escape its image as a "half-barbaric" instrument symbolic of antimodernism and sentimentalism.
Caught in the morass of American racial attitudes and often used to express ambivalence toward modern industrial society, the banjo stood in opposition to the "official" values of rationalism, modernism, and belief in the beneficence of material progress. Linn uses popular literature, visual arts, advertisements, film, performance practices, instrument construction and decoration, and song lyrics to illustrate how notions about the banjo have changed.
Linn also traces the instrument from its African origins through the 1980s, alternating between themes of urban modernization and rural nostalgia. She examines the banjo fad of bourgeois Northerners during the late nineteenth century; the African-American banjo tradition and the commercially popular cultural image of the southern black banjo player; the banjo's use in ragtime and early jazz; and the image of the white Southerner and mountaineer as banjo player.
If I slept too long, forgive me.
A north wind quickened the window frames
so the room pitched like a moving train
and the pillow’s whiff of hickory
and shaving soap conjured your body
beside me. So I slept in the berth
as the train chuffed on, unburdened
by waking’s cold water, ignorant
of pain, estrangement, hunger and
the crucial fuel the boiler burned
to keep the minutes’ pistons churning
while I slept. Forgive me.
That Kind of Happy, the long-awaited second collection by award-winning poet Maggie Dietz, explores the sharp, profound tension between a disquieted inner life and quotidian experience. Central to the book are poems that take up two major life events: becoming a mother and losing a father within a short stretch of time. Here, at the intersection of joy and grief, of persistence and attrition, Dietz wrestles with the questions posed by such conflicting experiences, revealing a mind suspicious of quick fixes and dissatisfied with easy answers. The result is a book as anguished as it is distinguished.
When the world descended into war in 1939, few European countries remained neutral; but of those that did, none provoked more controversy than Ireland.
Despite Winston Churchill's best efforts to the contrary, the Irish premier Eamon de Valera stuck determinedly to Ireland's right to remain outside a conflict in which it had no enemies. Accusations of betrayal and hypocrisy poisoned the media; legends of Nazi spies roaming the country depicted Ireland as a haven for Hitler's friends. Where previous histories of Ireland in the war years have focused on high politics, That Neutral Island mines deeper layers of experience. Sean O'Faolain, Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O'Brien and Louis MacNeice are a handful of writers whose stories, letters, and diaries illuminate this small country as it suffered rationing, censorship, the threat of invasion, and a strange detachment from the war.
Clair Wills brings to life the atmosphere of a country forced largely to do without modern technology. She describes the work of those who recovered the bodies of British sailors and airmen from the sea. She unearths the motivations of thousands who left to join the British forces. And she shows how ordinary people struggled to make sense of the Nazi threat through the lens of antagonism to Britain, the former colonial power. She acutely targets the sleight-of-hand that hovers around the Irish definition of "neutrality."
Elvis Presley and Bill Haley. Sam Cooke and the Shirelles. The Crows and the Chords. American Bandstand and Motown. From its first rumblings in the outland alphabet soup of R&B and C&W, rock & roll music promised to change the world--and did it.
Combining social history with a treasure trove of trivia, Richard Aquila unleashes the excitement of rock's first decade and shows how the music reflected American life from the mid-1950s through the dawn of Beatlemania. His year-by-year timelines and a photo essay place the music in historical perspective by linking artists and their hits to the news stories, movies, TV shows, fads, and lifestyles. In addition, he provides a concise biographical dictionary of the performers who made the charts between 1954 and 1963, along with the label and chart position of each of their hit songs.
In this book, Shapiro brings his characteristic warmth, humor, and many years as both poet and teacher to bear on questions surrounding two preoccupations: the role of conventions—of literary and social norms—in how we fashion our identities on and off the page, and how suffering both requires and resists self-expression. He sketches affectionate portraits of his early teachers, revisits the deaths of his brother and sister, and examines poems that have helped him navigate troubled times. Integrating storytelling and literary analysis so seamlessly that art and life become extensions of each other, Shapiro embodies in his lively prose the very qualities he celebrates in the poems he loves.
Brimming with wit and insight, this is a book for poets, students and scholars of poetry, teachers of literature, and everyone who cares about the literary arts and how they illuminate our personal and public lives.
Listen to a short interview with James DawesHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane
After the worst thing in the world happens, then what? What is left to the survivors, the witnesses, those who tried to help? What can we do to prevent more atrocities from happening in the future, and to stop the ones that are happening right now? That the World May Know tells the powerful and moving story of the successes and failures of the modern human rights movement. Drawing on firsthand accounts from fieldworkers around the world, the book gives a painfully clear picture of the human cost of confronting inhumanity in our day.
There is no dearth of such stories to tell, and James Dawes begins with those that emerged from the Rwandan genocide. Who, he asks, has the right to speak for the survivors and the dead, and how far does that right go? How are these stories used, and what does this tell us about our collective moral future? His inquiry takes us to a range of crises met by a broad array of human rights and humanitarian organizations. Here we see from inside the terrible stresses of human rights work, along with its curious seductions, and the myriad paradoxes and quandaries it presents.
With pathos, compassion, and a rare literary grace, this book interweaves personal stories, intellectual and political questions, art and aesthetics, and actual "news" to give us a compelling picture of humanity at its conflicted best, face-to-face with humanity at its worst.
A comprehensive historical study of the complete content and overall coherence of two and a half centuries of papal instructions that have variously aroused worldwide interest, scorn, fury, reaction, and consent. It provides the kind of analysis that concerned Roman Catholics, public officials, social ethicists, theologians, and students need. It is a textually inclusive and topically broad-gauged review of Catholic social teaching in its historical development, with a forthright assessment of its regrettable contradictions as well as of its valuable consistencies.
The volume also features selections from Krzhizhanovsky's compelling and idiosyncratic essays on Shakespeare, Pushkin, Shaw, and the philosophy of theater. Professionally, he worked with director Alexander Tairov at the Moscow Kamerny Theater, and his original philosophy of the stage bears comparison with the great theater theorists of the twentieth century. In these writings, he reflects on the space and time of the theater, the resonance of language onstage, the experience of the actor, and the relationship between the theater and the everyday. Commentary by Alisa Ballard Lin and Caryl Emerson contextualizes Krzhizhanovsky's writings.
Errázuriz presents more than the current Code of Canon Law. He instills a realistic perspective of right and law in the Church, and in so doing fills a massive gap in English scholarship. No introduction to canon law available in English rivals Errázuriz's description of justice in the Church and its relationship with communion and sacramentality.
Volume I is comprised of the first three chapters of the original, Corso fondamentale sul diritto nella Chiesa (in two volumes, Giuffrè: Milan, 2009 and 2017): "Rights, Justice and Law in the Church," "Canon Law in History," and "The Configuration of Rights and Law in the Church."
Being subject to law, Errázuriz observes, does not undermine the freedom and dignity of the person. Rather, ecclesial law intends to confront the human person with his true supernatural inheritance, while preserving him in the mystery of communion within which the Church herself exists. Indeed, the human person has both natural and supernatural dignity, and likewise responsibilities that bear upon the seen and unseen realms of communion.
Prof. Errázuriz examines the practical applications of personhood and law, as well as the perspectives of the human subject that derive from his ontological status. This is further drawn across various states of life that occur within the Church and the differing juridical relations encountered. Also considered is the nature of association in the Church, and Errázuriz breaks down the concepts and particular realities pertaining to this natural tendency and the legal discipline.
A work of natural and environmental history.
That Which Roots Us is a work of natural and environmental history that explores the origins of and resolutions to some of the United States’ environmental problems. Marion Dresner discusses the roots of Euro-American environmental exploitative action, starting with the environmental consequences of having treated Pacific Northwest forests as commodities. She shares her experiences visiting sites where animal-centered ice age culture changed to human-centered culture thousands of years ago with the advent of farming. The book explores the origins of the romantic philosophical movement, which arose out of the debilitating conditions of the industrial era. Those romantic attitudes toward nature inspired the twentieth-century preservation movement and America’s progressively modern conservation attitudes.
The book is centered around environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest, contrasting utilitarian views of nature with Native American practices of respect and reciprocity. The elements that make That Which Roots Us a truly unique and important contribution to environmental literature are the author’s personal recollections and interactions with the landscape. Ultimately, Dresner offers hope for a new stewardship of the land and a focus on science literacy and direct experience in the natural world as the most grounded way of knowing the planet.
The vocabulary of the past is always intriguing, especially when it is no longer used in modern English. Many of the words and phrases that were popular in Victorian England may sound foreign today, but looking to original sources and texts can yield fascinating insight, especially when we see how vocabulary was pilloried by the satirists of the day.
In That’s the Ticket for Soup!, the renowned language expert David Crystal returns to the pages of Punch magazine, England’s widely read satirical publication. Crystal has pored through the pages of Punch between its first issue in 1841 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and extracted the articles and cartoons that poked fun at the jargon of the day. Here we have Victorian high and low society, with its fashionable and unfashionable slang, its class awareness on display in the vocabulary of steam engines, motor cars, and other products of the Industrial Revolution. Then, as now, people had strong feelings about the flood of new words entering English. Swearing, new street names, and the many borrowings from French provoked continual irritation and mockery, as did the Americanisms increasingly encountered in the British press. In addition to these entertaining examples, Crystal includes commentary on the context of the times and informative glossaries. This original and amusing collection reveals how many present-day feelings about words can be traced to the satire of a century ago.
The critics may be right. But, as Charles L. Ponce de Leon explains in That’s the Way It Is, TV news has always walked a fine line between hard news and fluff. The familiar story of decline fails to acknowledge real changes in the media and Americans’ news-consuming habits, while also harking back to a golden age that, on closer examination, is revealed to be not so golden after all. Ponce de Leon traces the entire history of televised news, from the household names of the late 1940s and early ’50s, like Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Cronkite, through the rise of cable, the political power of Fox News, and the satirical punch of Colbert and Stewart. He shows us an industry forever in transition, where newsmagazines and celebrity profiles vie with political news and serious investigations. The need for ratings success—and the lighter, human interest stories that can help bring it—Ponce de Leon makes clear, has always sat uneasily alongside a real desire to report hard news.
Highlighting the contradictions and paradoxes at the heart of TV news, and telling a story rich in familiar figures and fascinating anecdotes, That’s the Way It Is will be the definitive account of how television has showed us our history as it happens.
In the sparsely settled hills of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, winter's toughness is matched only by the animosity and affection of its inhabitants for each other and for the land that unnerves them. In The Long White, Sharon Dilworth evokes a place dominated by two great lakes whose power and ferocity influence the lives of every inhabitant. The particularities of place and character come together with the clarity and exactitude of a fresh snowfall that both veils and illuminates a landscape.
This volume offers an unprecedented English translation of the second volume of Elementi teorico-practici di musica, with annotations and commentary. The translation is introduced with a study of Galeazzi's life and milieu, the genesis and sources for the Elementi, and its reception through the present day.
Stunning visuals and poetic text combine to tell the inspiring story of Lewis Hine (1874–1940), a teacher and photographer who employed his art as a tool for social reform. Working for the National Child Labor Committee, Hine traveled the United States, taking pictures of children as young as five toiling under dangerous conditions in cotton mills, seafood canneries, farms, and coal mines. He often wore disguises to sneak into factories, impersonating a machinery inspector or traveling salesman. He said, “If I could tell this story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug a camera.” His poignant pictures attracted national attention and were instrumental in the passage of child labor laws. The Traveling Camera contains extensive back matter, including a time line, original photos, and a bibliography.
Ages six to nine.
An epistemological diptych.
Plato, the great philosopher of Athens, was born in 427 BC. In early manhood an admirer of Socrates, he later founded the famous school of philosophy in the grove Academus. Much else recorded of his life is uncertain; that he left Athens for a time after Socrates’ execution is probable; that later he went to Cyrene, Egypt, and Sicily is possible; that he was wealthy is likely; that he was critical of “advanced” democracy is obvious. He lived to be 80 years old. Linguistic tests including those of computer science still try to establish the order of his extant philosophical dialogues, written in splendid prose and revealing Socrates’ mind fused with Plato’s thought.
In Laches, Charmides, and Lysis, Socrates and others discuss separate ethical conceptions. Protagoras, Ion, and Meno discuss whether righteousness can be taught. In Gorgias, Socrates is estranged from his city’s thought, and his fate is impending. The Apology (not a dialogue), Crito, Euthyphro, and the unforgettable Phaedo relate the trial and death of Socrates and propound the immortality of the soul. In the famous Symposium and Phaedrus, written when Socrates was still alive, we find the origin and meaning of love. Cratylus discusses the nature of language. The great masterpiece in ten books, the Republic, concerns righteousness (and involves education, equality of the sexes, the structure of society, and abolition of slavery). Of the six so-called dialectical dialogues Euthydemus deals with philosophy; metaphysical Parmenides is about general concepts and absolute being; Theaetetus reasons about the theory of knowledge. Of its sequels, Sophist deals with not-being; Politicus with good and bad statesmanship and governments; Philebus with what is good. The Timaeus seeks the origin of the visible universe out of abstract geometrical elements. The unfinished Critias treats of lost Atlantis. Unfinished also is Plato’s last work, Laws, a critical discussion of principles of law which Plato thought the Greeks might accept.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plato is in twelve volumes.
This original and insightful study explores the points at which theater and propaganda meet. Defining propaganda as a form of "activated ideology," George H. Szanto discusses the distortion of information that occurs in dramatic literature in its stage, film, and television forms.
Szanto analyzes the nature of "integration propaganda," which is designed to render the audience passive and to encourage the acceptance of the status quo, as opposed to "agitation propaganda," which aims to inspire the audience to action. In Szanto's view, most popular western theater is saturated, though usually not intentionally, with integration propaganda. The overall purpose of Theater and Propaganda is twofold: to analyze the nature of integration propaganda so that it becomes visible to western readers as a tool of the dominant class in society, and to examine the manner by which unself-conscious propagandistic methods have saturated dramatic presentation.
In discussing the importance of propaganda within and between technological states, the author examines the seminal work of Jacques Ellul. In this chapter he analyzes the function of integration propaganda in a relatively stable society. The following chapter defines and analyzes three theaters (in the sense of performance) of propaganda: the theater of agitation propaganda, of integration propaganda, and of dialectical propaganda. In this section he uses examples from a variety of plays, movies, and television commercials. In succeeding chapters Szanto discusses the role of integration propaganda in the medieval Wakefield mystery plays and the plays of Samuel Beckett. The appendix, "Contradiction and Demystification," provides a general model that suggests ways of breaking down and overcoming the propagandistic intentions of an artwork and discusses theater's possible role in this breakdown.
In Theater after Film, Martin Harries argues that after 1945, as cinema became omnipresent in popular culture, theater had to respond to cinema’s hegemony. Theater couldn’t break that hegemony, but it could provide a zone of contestation. Theater made film’s domination of the cultural field visible through hyperbole, refusal, and other strategies, thereby unsettling its power. Postwar theatrical experiment, Harries shows, often channeled and represented film’s mass cultural force, while knowing that it could never possess that force. Throughout the book, Harries brings critical theory into contact with theories of performance. Although Theater after Film treats the theatrical work of many figures, its central focus falls on Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Adrienne Kennedy. Discussions of these dramatists consider their ways of addressing spectators, the politics of race between film and theater, and the place of the theatrical apparatus. Readings of these central figures in twentieth-century theater exemplify the book’s historical engagement with the media surround that drama confronted. This confrontation, Harries shows, was central to the development of some of the most continually compelling postwar drama.
Rather than approaching the problem of racial reckoning through history, where periodization and progress are dominant narratives, Theater and Crisis argues that myth and memory allow for better theorization about recurring events from the past, their haunting, and what these apparent ghosts ask of us. Building on the study of myth as active, processual storytelling, Rankine acknowledges that it grounds and orients groups toward significant events. Theater and Crisis aligns narratives about Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd, among others, with ancient, mythic figures such as Christ, Dionysus, Oedipus, and Moses. As living and verbal visitations, these stories performed on stage encode the past through their epiphanies in the present, urging audiences toward shared meaning.
Rankine traces the cyclical hauntings of race through the refiguring of mythic stories across the past 75 years in the plays of James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Antoinette Nwandu, and many more, and in response to flashpoints in US racial history, such as the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the wars on drugs and crime, and the continued violence against and disenfranchisement of Black people into the twenty-first century. Theater and Crisis explores the appearance of myth on the American stage and showcases the ongoing response by the theatrical establishment to transform the stage into a space for racial reckoning. This timely book is essential reading for scholars of theater studies, classics, and American studies.
It locates ambiguities in our discourse about integrity, and it delves into conceptions of identity, morality, selfhood, and otherness. Its explorations ask if integrity is less a quality we might possess than a contingent gift that may appear, disappear, and perhaps reappear. Not only does he chart anew the ethical and religious dimensions of integrity, but he also reads closely across the history of theater, from Greek and Shakespearean drama to the likes of Seamus Heaney, T. S. Eliot, Caryl Churchill, Wole Soyinka, Tony Kushner, and Suzan-Lori Parks. His is an approach of juxtaposition and reflection, starting from the perennial observation that theater both criticizes and acknowledges dimensions of drama and theatricality in life.
Randai, the popular folk theater tradition of the Minangkabau ethnic group in West Sumatra, has evolved to include influences of martial arts, storytelling, and folk songs. Theater and Martial Arts in West Sumatra describes the origin, development, and cultural background of randai and highlights two recent developments: the emergence of female performers and modern staging techniques.
This book also explores the indigenous martial arts form silek, a vital part of randai today. The strong presence of silek is illustrated in the martial focus of the stories that are told through randai, in its movement repertoire, and even in its costumes and musical accompaniment. As Kirstin Pauka shows, randai, firmly rooted in silek and Minangkabau tradition, is an intriguing mirror of the Minangkabau culture.
Theater and Social Change not only tracks the historical evolution of political theater but also explores the current state and future prospects of different modes, including agit-prop, demonstrations, solo performance, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, and community-based production. With such notable contributors as Anna Deavere Smith, Jonathan Kalb, Holly Hughes, and Tony Kushner, the issue offers a diverse assemblage of personal statements, conversations, photographs, interviews, and performance text.
Contributors include: Reverend Billy, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Arlene Goldbard, Sharon Green, Lani Guinier, Holly Hughes, Jonathan Kalb, Tony Kushner, Judith Malina, Robbie McCauley, John O'Neal, Claudia Orenstein, Bill Rauch, Julie Salverson, Anna Deavere Smith, Alisa Solomon, Roberta Uno
In Theater and Violence, through interviews, play excerpts, and full-length plays—including the first American publication of two major German playwrights and directors—theater artists offer their own narratives for humankind’s violent psychologies. One full-length play, Falk Richter’s Seven Seconds (In God We Trust), probes the mind of an American pilot moments before he releases a bomb on a city below. Another, René Pollesch’s 24 Hours Are Not a Day, humorously explores the ironies and pathologies of globalization after September 11. The issue also includes a commentary on the National Endowment for the Arts’ Shakespeare presentations for the U.S. military; interviews with Russian theater artists on the first anniversary of the Chechen rebels’ siege of a Moscow theater; and Jonathan Kalb’s powerful adaptation of Heiner Müller’s Mauser, set in Tikrit.
Contributors. Josh Fox, Gitta Honegger, Jonathan Kalb, Anna Kohler, James Leverett, Mark Lord, Marlene Norst, René Pollesch, Falk Richter, Yana Ross, Scott Saul, Tom Sellar, Catherine Sheehy, Robert Woodruff
The rhetoric, or discourse, of early American theater emerged out of the figures of speech that permeated the colonists’ lives and literary productions. Jeffrey H. Richards examines a variety of texts—histories, diaries, letters, journals, poems, sermons, political tracts, trial transcripts, orations, and plays—and looks at the writings of such authors as John Winthrop and Mercy Otis Warren. Richards places the American usage of theatrum mundi—the world depicted as a stage—in the context of classical and Renaissance traditions, but shows how the trope functions in American rhetoric as a register for religious, political, and historical attitudes.
Features include:
Over 200 color-coded cards
Suggestions for focusing, side-coaching, and evaluating games
Games for students of all ages and levels of experience
Handbook included
The edition reflects Spolin’s wished-for updates: five important exercises have been added, and instructions presenting her improvisational approach have been clarified throughout. Her wealth of useful notes remain undiminished. Sidecoaching instructions and game evaluations are boxed and highlighted for on-the-spot reading by the director, in rehearsal. Viola Spolin has been called "the high priestess of improvisational theater," and the method that she created andpresented in her books not only remains the pedagogical standard but has found an even wider audience beyond theater.
Featuring a new foreword by renowned film director Rob Reiner, the updated edition is a necessary addition to any theater bookshelf.
Spolin's improvisational techniques changed the nature and practice of modern theater. Her work has inspired actors, directors, teachers, and writers in theater, television, and film. Her techniques have also influenced the fields of education, mental health, social work, and psychology.
The collection provides a thorough and engaging survey of the playwrights, directors, actors, and productions that comprise this dynamic theater, a theater whose evolution and ideology diverges from Anglo-American models. The book's early essays trace the development of Hebrew drama from its inception in Moscow in 1918 to the establishment of a national theater and the emergence of a national repertoire.
Succeeding essays explore the personalities and themes that have dominated the Israeli stage, featuring interviews with leading Israeli playwrights, actors, directors, and dramaturgs. The book also provides highlights from the first Palestinian and Israeli Arab Theater Symposium, focusing on the history, themes, and future of Arab theater.
The contributors include Karen Alkalay-Gut, Shosh Avigal, Linda Ben-Zvi, Erella Brown, Joseph Chaikin, Scott Cummings, Ben-Ami Feingold, Gad Kaynar, Shimon Lev- Ari, Shimon Levy, Gabriella Moscati-Steindler, Freddie Rokem, Eli Rozik, Gershon Shaked, Chaim Shoham, Michael Taub, Dan Urian, Shoshana Weitz, and Nurit Yaari.
"Impressive historical, critical, and theoretical depth . . . a sophisticated introduction to theater in Israel." --Anne Golomb Hoffman, Fordham University
Linda Ben-Zvi is Professor of English and Theater, Colorado State University, and Professor of Theater, Tel Aviv University.
At a time when the New Left and the counterculture were on the rise, these artists reflected the decade's political and cultural radicalism and helped to define a new aesthetic. Civil rights activists mobilized singing in the struggle for desegregation, introducing a vibrant musical form into the public space. The Living Theatre culminated an arduous quest to mesh artistic and political goals, leading audiences from theaters into the streets to begin the "beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution." The Diggers playfully engaged San Francisco's counterculture in politics with their carnivalesque public actions. The Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Action Art Group sought to disrupt the conventional art world, mounting protests in and around New York City museums.
By questioning the values and assumptions that separated art from politics, these groups not only established public performance as a legitimate aesthetic but also provided a new creative vocabulary for future generations of artists. Their continued involvement with the women's liberation movement, rural communes, and political street theater into the 1970s and beyond challenges the popular myth that activists disengaged from politics after the 1960s.
Emerging amid the turbulent rise of market finance and wider socioeconomic changes, modern drama enacted vital critiques of art and life under capitalism. Alisa Zhulina shows how fin-de-siècle playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, and Gerhart Hauptmann interrogated the meaning of this newly coined economic concept. Acutely aware of their complicity in the system they sought to challenge, these playwrights staged economic questions as moral and political concerns, using their plays to explore the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and others within the boundaries of bourgeois theater.
Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life reveals the prescient and unsettling visions of life in a new financial and societal reality in now-canonical plays such as A Doll’s House, Miss Julie, and The Cherry Orchard, as well as in lesser-known and long-overlooked works. This wide-ranging study prompts us to reevaluate modern drama and its legacy for the urgent economic and political questions that haunt our present moment.
Bringing such provocative and iconoclastic insights to bear on Shakespeare, Girard reveals the previously overlooked coherence of problem plays like Troilus and Cressida, and makes a convincing argument for elevating A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the status of a chaotic comedy to a masterpiece. The book abounds with novel and provocative interpretations: Shakespeare becomes "a prophet of modern advertising," and the threat of nuclear disaster is read in the light of Hamlet. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is a brief, but brilliant aside in which an entirely new perspective is brought to the chapter on Joyce’s Ulysses in which Stephen Dedalus gives a lecture on Shakespeare. In Girard’s view only Joyce, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century novelists, comes close to understanding the greatest of Renaissance playwrights.
Throughout this impressively sustained reading of Shakespeare, Girard’s prose is sophisticated, but contemporary, and accessible to the general reader.
This book examines the theater of narration, an Italian performance genre and aesthetic that revisits historical events of national importance from local perspectives, drawing on the rich relationship between personal experiences and historical accounts. Incorporating original research from the private archives of leading narrators—artists who write and perform their work—Juliet Guzzetta argues that the practice teaches audiences how ordinary people aren’t simply witnesses to history but participants in its creation.
The theater of narration emerged in Italy during the labor and student protests, domestic terrorism, and social progress of the 1970s. Developing Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s style of political theater, influenced by Jerzy Grotowski and Bertolt Brecht, and following in the freewheeling actor‑author traditions of the commedia dell’arte, narrators created a new form of popular theater that grew in prominence in the 1990s and continues to gain recognition. Guzzetta traces the history of the theater of narration, contextualizing its origins—both political and intellectual—and centers the contributions of Teatro Settimo, a performance group overlooked in previous studies. She also examines the genre’s experiments in television and media.
The first full-length book in English on the subject, The Theater of Narration leverages close readings and a wealth of primary sources to examine the techniques used by narrators to remake history—a process that reveals the ways in which history itself is a theater of narration.
A Theater of Our Own is a fascinating, fast-paced, and fact-filled chronicle of Chicago's legendary theater scene by the long-time chief critic for the Chicago Tribune. Who produced the first stage adaptation of "The Wizard of Oz" in 1902-nearly forty years before the movie classic? What entertainment juggernaut began in a converted Chinese laundry on Wells Street in 1959? Where did Louis (Studs) Terkel make his stage debut? When did the original production of "Grease" open at Kingston Mines Theater? Richard Christiansen, former chief critic for the Chicago Tribune, answers these and many more questions about the rich role of the theater in Chicago, from its earliest days in 1837 to its present state as a diverse community of artists with international stature.
In A Theater of Our Own, he draws upon his exclusive interviews, insights, and memories gathered over a period of more than forty years of reviewing the arts. This history and memoir traces the evolution of the Chicago theater scene from small theaters to major institutions such as the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the Goodman Theater, and The Second City. Along the way, Richard Christiansen relates his behind-the-scenes conversations with some of Chicago's most acclaimed writers, directors, and actors--David Mamet, Frank Galati, Mary Zimmerman, John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Harold Ramis, Gary Sinise, and Joe Mantegna--all a part of Chicago's theater renaissance from the 1970s onward. To this day, Chicago remains a city known for its imaginative, innovative, and influential theaters and artists. A Theater of Our Own, a valuable contribution to the history of theater, is a book written for anyone who enjoys the theater and its people as well as the story of Chicago.
The relationship between actors and spectators has been of perennial interest to playwrights. The Roman playwright Plautus (ca. 200 BCE) was particularly adept at manipulating this relationship. Plautus allowed his actors to acknowledge freely the illusion in which they were taking part, to elicit laughter through humorous asides and monologues, and simultaneously to flatter and tease the spectators.
These metatheatrical techniques are the focus of Timothy J. Moore's innovative study of the comedies of Plautus. The first part of the book examines Plautus' techniques in detail, while the second part explores how he used them in the plays Pseudolus, Amphitruo, Curculio, Truculentus, Casina, and Captivi. Moore shows that Plautus employed these dramatic devices not only to entertain his audience but also to satirize aspects of Roman society, such as shady business practices and extravagant spending on prostitutes, and to challenge his spectators' preconceptions about such issues as marriage and slavery. These findings forge new links between Roman comedy and the social and historical context of its performance.
This study of the lived experience of spectacular politics on the world stage draws on theories of theater, performance, and politics to offer new ways of approaching issues of war, cosmopolitanism, international justice, governance, and activism. Situated at the nexus of two disciplines, performance studies and political science, this volume encourages conversations between the two so that each might offer lessons to the other.
For generations, fans and critics have characterized classic American radio drama as a “theater of the mind.” This book unpacks that characterization by recasting the radio play as an aesthetic object within its unique historical context. In Theater of the Mind, Neil Verma applies an array of critical methods to more than six thousand recordings to produce a vivid new account of radio drama from the Depression to the Cold War.
In this sweeping exploration of dramatic conventions, Verma investigates legendary dramas by the likes of Norman Corwin, Lucille Fletcher, and Wyllis Cooper on key programs ranging from The Columbia Workshop, The Mercury Theater on the Air, and Cavalcade of America to Lights Out!, Suspense, and Dragnet to reveal how these programs promoted and evolved a series of models of the imagination.
With close readings of individual sound effects and charts of broad trends among formats, Verma not only gives us a new account of the most flourishing form of genre fiction in the mid-twentieth century but also presents a powerful case for the central place of the aesthetics of sound in the history of modern experience.
Greek drama has been subject to ongoing textual and historical interpretation, but surprisingly little scholarship has examined the people who composed the theater audiences in Athens. Typically, scholars have presupposed an audience of Athenian male citizens viewing dramas created exclusively for themselves—a model that reduces theater to little more than a medium for propaganda. Women's theater attendance remains controversial, and little attention has been paid to the social class and ethnicity of the spectators. Whose theater was it?
Producing the first book-length work on the subject, David Kawalko Roselli draws on archaeological and epigraphic evidence, economic and social history, performance studies, and ancient stories about the theater to offer a wide-ranging study that addresses the contested authority of audiences and their historical constitution. Space, money, the rise of the theater industry, and broader social forces emerge as key factors in this analysis. In repopulating audiences with foreigners, slaves, women, and the poor, this book challenges the basis of orthodox interpretations of Greek drama and places the politically and socially marginal at the heart of the theater. Featuring an analysis of the audiences of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander, Theater of the People brings to life perhaps the most powerful influence on the most prominent dramatic poets of their day.
Bringing together a series of two dozen photographs with essays discussing and analyzing the influence of the media, particularly photographs and video, on the culture at large and how conflict is "discussed" in the visual realm, Theater of War is a unique look at the influence of contemporary conflict, and their omni-presence in the media on popular culture. Written by an experienced photojournalist who has covered a variety of human rights issues worldwide, this book is an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in the confluence of war and media.
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