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Objects as Actors
Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy
Melissa Mueller
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Objects as Actors charts a new approach to Greek tragedy based on an obvious, yet often overlooked, fact: Greek tragedy was meant to be performed. As plays, the works were incomplete without physical items—theatrical props. In this book, Melissa Mueller ingeniously demonstrates the importance of objects in the staging and reception of Athenian tragedy.

As Mueller shows, props such as weapons, textiles, and even letters were often fully integrated into a play’s action. They could provoke surprising plot turns, elicit bold viewer reactions, and provide some of tragedy’s most thrilling moments. Whether the sword of Sophocles’s Ajax, the tapestry in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, or the tablet of Euripides’s Hippolytus, props demanded attention as a means of uniting—or disrupting—time, space, and genre.

Insightful and original, Objects as Actors offers a fresh perspective on the central tragic texts—and encourages us to rethink ancient theater as a whole.
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Occupying the Stage
The Theater of May '68
Kate Bredeson
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Occupying the Stage: the Theater of May '68 tells the story of student and worker uprisings in France through the lens of theater history, and the story of French theater through the lens of May '68. Based on detailed archival research and original translations, close readings of plays and historical documents, and a rigorous assessment of avant-garde theater history and theory, Occupying the Stage proposes that the French theater of 1959–71 forms a standalone paradigm called "The Theater of May '68." 

The book shows how French theater artists during this period used a strategy of occupation-occupying buildings, streets, language, words, traditions, and artistic processes-as their central tactic of protest and transformation. It further proposes that the Theater of May '68 has left imprints on contemporary artists and activists, and that this theater offers a scaffolding on which to build a meaningful analysis of contemporary protest and performance in France, North America, and beyond.

At the book's heart is an inquiry into how artists of the period used theater as a way to engage in political work and, concurrently, questioned and overhauled traditional theater practices so their art would better reflect the way they wanted the world to be. Occupying the Stage embraces the utopic vision of May '68 while probing the period's many contradictions. It thus affirms the vital role theater can play in the ongoing work of social change.
 
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Odd Man Out
A Memoir of the Holllywood Ten
Edward Dmytryk
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee rudely interrupted the successful career and life of Edward Dmytryk, citing him with contempt of Congress. As a result, Dmytryk was fired by RKO and spent three years in England before returning to the United States to serve a six-month jail sentence and undergo a second round of hearings, during which he recanted and provided evidence against several of his former colleagues.

In this personal and perceptive book, Dmytryk sharply chronicles the history of a particularly turbulent era in American political life while examining his own life before and after the events universally called the witch hunts. He details his brief membership in the Communist Party of America, explaining his initial commitment to what he perceived as communist ideals of civil liberties, economic justice, and antifacism, followed by his eventual disillusionment with the party as itbetrayed those ideals. He goes on to provide a fair assessment of what then happened to him and the effect it had on the rest of his life.

Dmytryk describes the activities, prejudices, and personal behaviors of all the parties enmeshed in the congressional hearings on communism in Hollywood. His reactions to other members of the Hollywood Ten and his recollection of conversations with them lend his book an immediacy that is not only informative but also absorbing. Most importantly, he does not uphold an ideology but rather presents the events as he perceived them, understood them, and responded to them. Dmytryk’s account is characterized by an openness born of a mature awareness of personal trial as history.

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Odysseys of Recognition
Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist
Wiggins, Ellwood
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Literary recognition is a technical term for a climactic plot device. Odysseys of Recognition claims that interpersonal recognition is constituted by performance, and brings performance theory into dialogue with poetics, politics, and philosophy. By observing Odysseus figures from Homer to Kleist, Ellwood Wiggins offers an alternative to conventional intellectual histories that situate the invention of the interior self in modernity. Through strategic readings of Aristotle, this elegantly written, innovative study recovers an understanding of interpersonal recognition that has become strange and counterintuitive. Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey offers a model for agency in ethical knowledge that has a lot to teach us today. Early modern and eighteenth-century characters, meanwhile, discover themselves not deep within an impenetrable self, but in the interpersonal space between people in the world. Recognition, Wiggins contends, is the moment in which epistemology and ethics coincide: in which what we know becomes manifest in what we do.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Off Sites
Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific
Bertie Ferdman
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Honorable Mention, ATHE's 2018 Outstanding Book Award 

Contextualizing the techniques and methods of the incredibly rich and vital genre of site-specific performance, author Bertie Ferdman traces the evolution of that term. Originally used for experimental staging practices and then later also for engaged situational events, site-specific is no longer sufficient for the genre’s many contemporary variations.

Using the term off-site, Ferdman illustrates five distinct ways artists have challenged the disciplinary framework of site-specific theatre: blurring the traditional boundaries between the fictional and the real; changing how the audience and actor interact with each other and whether they are physically together or apart; fabricating sites from physically bound, conceptually constructed, or virtual spaces; staging live situations in real/nonreal and often mediated encounters; and challenging our preconceived notions of time and space. Tracing the genealogy of site-based work through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ferdman outlines the theoretical groundwork for her study in the introduction. Individual chapters focus on distinct types of off-sites—the interdisciplinary discourse of disciplinary sites; the spaces of audience engagement with spectator sites; the dislocation of time for temporal sites; and the historiographical spaces of mapping for urban sites.   

Ferdman examines site-based work being done in the Americas by contemporary companies and artists experimenting with new forms and practices for site-driven theatre. Key productions discussed include Private Moment by David Levine, Geyser Land by Mary Ellen Strom and Ann Carlson, Jim Findlay’s Dream of the Red Chamber, and Lola Arias’ Mi Vida Después.
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Off-Screen Cinema
Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde
Kaira M. Cabañas
University of Chicago Press, 2015
One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists.

Off-Screen Cinema is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists. Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose “discrepant editing” deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Cabañas's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.
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Olivier Messiaen
Robert Sholl
Reaktion Books
Drawing on a range of sources and fields, the rich life story of this polymathic composer.
 
This groundbreaking biography offers fresh perspectives on the life, ideas, and music of French twentieth-century composer, organist, and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen. Drawing from previously unexplored sketches and archival material, the book seamlessly combines elements of biography, musicology, theology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics to present a nuanced perspective on Messiaen’s work. Robert Sholl explores the profound impact of Messiaen’s devout Catholicism, which found expression through his work as a church organist, his engagement with birdsong, his interaction with Surrealism, and his profound influence on major musical figures of the latter twentieth century. Unlike previous biographies, this book also considers the perspectives of Messiaen’s contemporaries and students, providing a comprehensive understanding of his life and artistic legacy.
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On Broadway
Art and Commerce on the Great White Way
Steven Adler
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

At a critical, transitional moment in the history of Broadway—and, by extension, of American theatre itself—former Broadway stage manager Steven Adlerenlists insider perspectives from sixty-six practitioners and artists to chronicle the recent past and glimpse the near future of the Great White Way. From marquee names to behind-the-scenes power brokers, Adler has assembled a distinctly knowledgeable cast of theatre’s elite, including Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Des McAnuff, Frank Rich, Robin Wagner, Rocco Landesman, Robert Longbottom, Todd Haimes, Bernard Gersten, and Alan Eisenberg.

On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way spotlights the differing vantage points of performers, artists, writers, managers, producers, critics, lawyers, theatre owners, union leaders, city planners, and other influential players. Each details his or her firsthand account of the creative and economic forces that have wrought extraordinary changes in the way Broadway theatre is conceived, produced, marketed, and executed. Once the paramount site of American theatre, Broadway today is becoming a tourist-driven, family-friendly, middle-class entertainment oasis in Midtown, an enterprise inextricably bound to the larger mosaic of national and international professional theatre.

Accounting for this transformation and presaging Broadway’s identity for the twenty-first century, Adler and his interviewees assess the impact of the advent of corporate producers, the ascendance of not-for-profit theatres on Broadway, and the growing interdependence between regional and Broadway productions. Also critiqued are the important roles of the radical urban redevelopment staged in Times Square and the changing demographics and appetites of contemporary theatre audiences in New York and around the globe.

Actors and administrators, performers and producers, theatre students and theatregoers will all benefit from the perceptive insights in this authoritative account of theatre making for the new millennium.

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On Living with Television
Amy Holdsworth
Duke University Press, 2021
In On Living with Television, Amy Holdsworth examines the characteristics of intimacy, familiarity, repetition, and duration that have come to exemplify the medium of television. Drawing on feminist television studies, queer theory, and disability studies as well as autobiographical life-writing practices, Holdsworth shows how television shapes everyday activities, from eating and sleeping to driving and homemaking. Recounting her own life with television, she offers a sense of the joys and pleasures Disney videos brought to her disabled sister, traces how bedtime television becomes part of a daily routine between child and caregiver, explores her own relationship to binge-eating and binge-viewing, and considers the idea of home through the BBC family drama Last Tango in Halifax. By foregrounding the ways in which television structures our relationships, daily routines, and sense of time, Holdsworth demonstrates how television emerges as a potent vehicle for writing about life.
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On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone
Philip Ewell
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Since its inception in the mid-twentieth century, American music theory has been framed and taught almost exclusively by white men. As a result, whiteness and maleness are woven into the fabric of the field, and BIPOC music theorists face enormous hurdles due to their racial identities. In On Music Theory, Philip Ewell brings together autobiography, music theory and history, and theory and history of race in the United States to offer a black perspective on the state of music theory and to confront the field’s white supremacist roots. Over the course of the book, Ewell undertakes a textbook analysis to unpack the mythologies of whiteness and western-ness with respect to music theory, and gives, for the first time, his perspective on the controversy surrounding the publication of volume 12 of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. He speaks directly about the antiblackness of music theory and the antisemitism of classical music writ large and concludes by offering suggestions about how we move forward. Taking an explicitly antiracist approach to music theory, with this book Ewell begins to create a space in which those who have been marginalized in music theory can thrive.
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On the History of Film Style
David Bordwell
Harvard University Press, 1997

The study of cinematic style has profoundly shaped our attitude toward movies. Style assigns films to a tradition, distinguishes a classic, and signals the arrival of a pathbreaking innovation. David Bordwell now shows how film scholars have attempted to explain stylistic continuity and change across the history of cinema.

Bordwell scrutinizes the theories of style launched by André Bazin, Noël Burch, and other film historians. In the process he celebrates a century of cinema, integrating discussions of film classics such as The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane with analyses of more current box-office successes such as Jaws and The Hunt for Red October. Examining the contributions of both noted and neglected directors, he considers the earliest filmmaking, the accomplishments of the silent era, the development of Hollywood, and the strides taken by European and Asian cinema in recent years.

On the History of Film Style proposes that stylistic developments often arise from filmmakers' search for engaging and efficient solutions to production problems. Bordwell traces this activity across history through a detailed discussion of cinematic staging. Illustrated with more than 400 frame enlargements, this wide-ranging study provides a new lens for viewing cinema.

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On the Record
Music Journalists on Their Lives, Craft, and Careers
Mike Hilleary
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
Rolling Stone, Creem, the Village Voice, SPIN, Billboard, Stereogum, Pitchfork. How did the music journalists who write for these popular publications break into the business? How have they honed their writing and interviewing techniques? How have they managed to thrive amid major changes in the industry, as print magazines have declined and digital publications have emerged? What does it take to turn a love of music into a professional writing career?

Bringing together interviews from an impressive roster of over fifty music writers, Mike Hilleary offers up an engaging and wide-reaching examination of the past and potential future of music journalism. This accessible oral history contains professional insights into journalists' craft and purpose, practical advice, and essential life lessons from a diverse cast of music writers—ranging from long-respected veterans of the field such as Rob Sheffield, Jessica Hopper, Ann Powers, and Chuck Klosterman to must-read modern voices including Amanda Petrusich, Hanif Abdurraqib, Lindsay Zoladz, and Jayson Greene. Honest and absorbing, On the Record will educate and enlighten anyone who wants to write about music, or anyone who wants a better understanding about those who do.
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On The Wire
Linda Williams
Duke University Press, 2014
Many television critics, legions of fans, even the president of the United States, have cited The Wire as the best television series ever. In this sophisticated examination of the HBO serial drama that aired from 2002 until 2008, Linda Williams, a leading film scholar and authority on the interplay between film, melodrama, and issues of race, suggests what exactly it is that makes The Wire so good. She argues that while the series is a powerful exploration of urban dysfunction and institutional failure, its narrative power derives from its genre. The Wire is popular melodrama, not Greek tragedy, as critics and the series creator David Simon have claimed. Entertaining, addictive, funny, and despairing all at once, it is a serial melodrama grounded in observation of Baltimore's people and institutions: of cops and criminals, schools and blue-collar labor, local government and local journalism. The Wire transforms close observation into an unparalleled melodrama by juxtaposing the good and evil of individuals with the good and evil of institutions.
 
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One Man’s Documentary
A Memoir of the Early Years of the National Film Board
Graham McInnes
University of Manitoba Press, 2004
Graham McInnes was one of many talented young people recruited by the charismatic John Grierson to build the National Film Board of Canada during the heady days of WWII. McInnes’s memoir of these “days of high excitement” is an insider’s look at the NFB from 1939 to 1945, a vivid “origin” story of Canada’s emerging world-class film studio that provides the NFB with the kind of full-bodied vitality usually associated with the great Hollywood studios in their golden years.An art critic and CBC radio commentator when he joined the NFB in 1939 as a scriptwriter, McInnes worked on many film classics with filmmakers such as Tom Daly, Norman McLaren, Gudrun Parker, and Budge Crawley. McInnes portrays these legends as well as many other players in that dynamic world, such as Lorne Green, Morley Callaghan, and Mavis Gallant, in this stylish, witty, and affectionate recreation of the early day-to-day frenzy.One Man’s Documentary is a lively account of one of the most exciting periods in Canadian filmmaking. With style and verve, McInnes paints vivid portraits of Grierson and the others who helped make the NFB an international institution. Film historian Gene Walz’s introduction gives a full picture of the early history of the NFB as well as an account of McInnes’s fascinating life.
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One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount
Popular Music on Early Television
Murray Forman
Duke University Press, 2012
Elvis Presley's television debut in January 1956 is often cited as the moment when popular music and television came together. Murray Forman challenges that contention, revealing popular music as crucial to television years before Presley's sensational small-screen performances. Drawing on trade and popular journalism, internal television and music industry documents, and records of audience feedback, Forman provides a detailed history of the incorporation of musical performances into TV programming during the medium's formative years, from 1948 to 1955. He examines how executives in the music and television industries understood and responded to the convergence of the two media; how celebrity musicians such as Vaughn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Fred Waring struggled to adjust to television; and how relative unknowns with an intuitive feel for the medium were sometimes catapulted to stardom. Forman argues that early television production influenced the aesthetics of musical performance in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly those of emerging musical styles such as rock and roll. At the same time, popular music helped to shape the nascent medium of television—its technologies, program formats, and industry structures. Popular music performances were essential to the allure and success of TV in its early years.
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Only Among Women
Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940
Anne Eakin Moss
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Only Among Women reveals how the idea of a community of women as a social sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex, or self-interest originated in the classic Russian novel, fueled mystical notions of unity in turn-of-the-century modernism, and finally assumed a privileged place in Stalinist culture, especially cinema.
 
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Only the Names Have Been Changed
Dragnet, the Police Procedural, and Postwar Culture
Claudia Calhoun
University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 Peter C. Rollins Book Award, Northeast Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations (NEPCA)

In the postwar era, the police procedural series Dragnet informed Americans on the workings of the criminal justice system and instructed them in their responsibilities as citizens.


Among shifting politics, tastes, and technology in television history, one genre has been remarkably persistent: the cop show. Claudia Calhoun returns to Dragnet, the pioneering police procedural and an early transmedia franchise, appearing on radio in 1949, on TV and in film in the 1950s, and in later revivals. More than a popular entertainment, Dragnet was a signifier of America’s postwar confidence in government institutions—and a publicity vehicle for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Only the Names Have Been Changed shows how Dragnet’s “realistic” storytelling resonated across postwar culture. Calhoun traces Dragnet’s “semi-documentary” predecessors, and shows how Jack Webb, Dragnet’s creator, worked directly with the LAPD as he produced a series that would likewise inspire public trust by presenting day-to-day procedural justice, rather than shootouts and wild capers. Yet this realism also set aside the seething racial tensions of Los Angeles as it was. Dragnet emerges as a foundational text, one that taught audiences to see police as everyday heroes not only on TV but also in daily life, a lesson that has come under scrutiny as Americans increasingly seek to redefine the relationship between policing and public safety.

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The Only Way Out
The Racial and Sexual Performance of Escape
Katherine Brewer Ball
Duke University Press, 2024
In The Only Way Out, Katherine Brewer Ball explores the American fascination with the escape story. Brewer Ball argues that escape is a key site for exploring American conceptions of freedom and constraint. Stories of escape are never told just once but become mythic in their episodic iterations, revealing the fantasies and desires of society, the storyteller, and the listener. While white escape narratives have typically been laden with Enlightenment fantasies of redemption where freedom is available to any individual willing to seize it, Brewer Ball explores how Black and queer escape offer forms of radical possibility. Drawing on Black studies, queer theory, and performance studies, she examines a range of works, from nineteenth-century American literature to contemporary queer of color art and writing by contemporary American artists including Wilmer Wilson IV, Tourmaline, Tony Kushner, Junot Díaz, Glenn Ligon, Toshi Reagon, and Sharon Hayes. Throughout, escape emerges as a story not of individuality but of collectivity and entanglement.
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Open Wounds
Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori
Edited by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz
University of Michigan Press, 2022
This volume collects original essays on Hungarian-German playwright and screenwriter George Tabori (1914–2007) and his remarkable contributions to the stage. Tabori, a Jewish refugee and a truly transnational author, was best known for his work in New York theater that irreverently explored the Jewish experience, particularly the Holocaust. Although his illustrious career spanned a century, two continents, several languages, and a variety of literary genres, Tabori’s work has received scant attention in American letters, in spite of its significance for U.S. theater and Holocaust studies.

Until Tabori, most dramas about the Holocaust were either rooted in American domestic realism, striving to create a strong empathetic connection between the audience and Holocaust victims, or featured an unembellished documentary style. Tabori staked out a third position, beyond realism and documentation. The volume brings together the voices of international scholars to provide a comprehensive introduction to Tabori’s theater as well as in-depth analyses of his work, discussing all of his major plays. Individual essays address Tabori’s postdramatic theater in relation to sacrificial ritual, performance studies, and post-humanist approaches to the contemporary stage, as well as performance aspects of his productions, questions of ethics and aesthetics raised by his theater, and his plays’ relation to Holocaust representation in popular culture.
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Opera and Sovereignty
Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy
Martha Feldman
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Performed throughout Europe during the 1700s, Italian heroic opera, or opera seria, was the century’s most significant musical art form, profoundly engaging such figures as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. Opera and Sovereignty is the first book to address this genre as cultural history, arguing that eighteenth-century opera seria must be understood in light of the period’s social and political upheavals.

Taking an anthropological approach to European music that’s as bold as it is unusual, Martha Feldman traces Italian opera’s shift from a mythical assertion of sovereignty, with its festive forms and rituals, to a dramatic vehicle that increasingly questioned absolute ideals. She situates these transformations against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Italian culture to show how opera seria both reflected and affected the struggles of rulers to maintain sovereignty in the face of a growing public sphere.  In so doing, Feldman explains why the form had such great international success and how audience experiences of the period differed from ours today. Ambitiously interdisciplinary, Opera and Sovereignty will appeal not only to scholars of music and anthropology, but also to those interested in theater, dance, and the history of the Enlightenment.
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Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France
Olivia Bloechl
University of Chicago Press, 2018
From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique).
 
In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time.
 
By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.
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Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth
Edited by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli
University of Chicago Press, 2003
The History of Italian Opera marks the first time a team of scholars has worked together to investigate the entire Italian operatic tradition, rather than limiting its focus to major composers and their masterworks. Including both musicologists and historians of other arts, the contributors approach opera not only as a distinctive musical genre but also as a form of extravagant theater and a complex social phenomenon.

This sixth volume in the series centers on the sociological and critical aspects of opera in Italy, considering the art in the context of an Italian literary and cultural canon rarely revealed in English and American studies. In its six chapters, contributors survey critics' changing attitudes toward opera over several centuries, trace the evolution of formal conventions among librettists, explore the historical relationships between opera and Italian literature, and examine opera's place in Italian popular and national culture. In perhaps the volume's most striking contribution, German scholar Carl Dahlouse offers his most important statement on the dramaturgy of opera.
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Opera Production and Its Resources
Edited by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Standing at the forefront of historiographical research, The History of Italian Opera marks the first time a multidisciplinary team of scholars has worked together to investigate the entire Italian operatic tradition, rather than limiting the focus to major composers and their masterworks. Including both musicologists and historians of other arts, the contributors approach opera not only as a distinctive musical genre but also as a form of extravagant theater and a complex social phenomenon.

Opera Production and Its Resources traces the social, economic, and artistic history of the production of opera from its origins around 1600 to contemporary stagings. From the very beginning, opera has been a chronically deficit-producing enterprise. Yet it maintained unchallenged preeminence in the culture of all Italians for centuries. The first half explores the central role of theater impresarios in putting on these complex productions and in increasing the output of librettos and scores. The second half considers the roles of the three key figures in the creation of any opera: the librettist, the composer, and the singer.
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Opera, Sex and Other Vital Matters
Paul Robinson
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters gathers both classic and never-before-published essays from one of the leading stylists in contemporary American letters, and one of our more revered public intellectuals, Paul Robinson. Diverse and elegant, the essays in this new collection showcase the sly wit and lightly worn erudition of their author. Each celebrates art and the flesh, directing us to the twin ecstasies of music and eros.

The essays on opera gathered here explore how masterpieces like Fidelio and The Magic Flute reflect the intellectual currents of their day. Be it the work of Verdi or Mozart, Wagner or Strauss, Robinson compels us to search for meaning not just in the lyrics of opera but also in the music. In melody, not libretto, we are more likely to discern key historical complexities and appreciate the way opera transcends language and time. The essays on sexuality, meanwhile, are ruminative, funny, and even moving. At one moment, Robinson measures whether homosexuality is the result of destiny or free choice. In another, he shares a touching exchange of letters with a gay student in the process of coming out. The final essays that encompass "other vital matters" find Robinson at his most incisive. Whether defending Freud as the most influential thinker of the twentieth century, attacking the dreaded use of semicolons, reflecting on his own mortality, or even meditating on the nature of cats, Sex, Opera, and Other Vital Matters is an eclectic work that will appeal to any reader interested in the continuing relevance of ideas to life.
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The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi
Abramo Basevi
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Abramo Basevi published his study of Verdi’s operas in Florence in 1859, in the middle of the composer’s career. The first thorough, systematic examination of Verdi’s operas, it covered the twenty works produced between 1842 and 1857—from Nabucco and Macbeth to Il trovatore, La traviata, and Aroldo. But while Basevi’s work is still widely cited and discussed—and nowhere more so than in the English-speaking world—no translation of the entire volume has previously been available. The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi fills this gap, at the same time providing an invaluable critical apparatus and commentary on Basevi’s work.
 
As a contemporary of Verdi and a trained musician, erudite scholar, and critic conversant with current and past operatic repertories, Basevi presented pointed discussion of the operas and their historical context, offering today’s readers a unique window into many aspects of operatic culture, and culture in general, in Verdi’s Italy. He wrote with precision on formal aspects, use of melody and orchestration, and other compositional features, which made his study an acknowledged model for the growing field of music criticism. Carefully annotated and with an engaging introduction and detailed glossary by editor Stefano Castelvecchi, this translation illuminates Basevi’s musical and historical references as well as aspects of his language that remain difficult to grasp even for Italian readers.
 
Making Basevi’s important contribution to our understanding of Verdi and his operas available to a broad audience for the first time, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi will delight scholars and opera enthusiasts alike.
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The Organ in Manitoba
A History of the Instruments, the Builders, and the Players
James B. Hartman
University of Manitoba Press, 1997
Pipe organs were once a central (and sometimes hotly debated) part of Manitoba's cultural life. The Organ in Manitoba portrays that history--the instruments, builders, players and critics--from the date of the earliest known installations to the 1990s, and includes information on musical organizations such as the Royal Canadian College of Organists. It documents over a century of evolution and changes, from concepts of tonal design to styles of musical commentary and tastes, and includes an inventory of installations and specifications for over 100 organs. Well-illustrated with photographs and excerpts from historical reviews and other documents, it will be of interest to musicians, teachers, and music, church, and cultural historians.
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The Oriental Obscene
Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era
Sylvia Shin Huey Chong
Duke University Press, 2011
The Oriental Obscene is a sophisticated analysis of Americans’ reactions to visual representations of the Vietnam War, such as the photograph of the “napalm girl,” news footage of the Tet Offensive, and feature films from The Deer Hunter to Rambo: First Blood Part II. Sylvia Shin Huey Chong combines psychoanalytic and film theories with U.S. cultural history to explain what she terms the oriental obscene: racialized fantasies that Americans derived largely from images of Asians as the perpetrators or victims of extreme violence. Chong contends that these fantasies helped Americans to process the trauma of the Vietnam War, as well as the growth of the Asian American population after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the postwar immigration of Southeast Asian refugees. The oriental obscene animated a wide range of political narratives, not only the movements for and against the war, but causes as diverse as the Black Power movement, law-and-order conservatism, second-wave feminism, and the nascent Asian American movement. During the Vietnam era, pictures of Asian bodies were used to make sense of race, violence, and America’s identity at home and abroad.
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The Origins of Cool in Postwar America
Joel Dinerstein
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change.

Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool.

This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.
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Ornette Coleman
The Territory and the Adventure
Maria Golia
Reaktion Books, 2022
With striking photographs and personal insight, a compelling biography of the great American saxophonist and free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman.

Ornette Coleman’s career encompassed the glory years of jazz and the American avant-garde. Born in segregated Fort Worth, Texas, during the Great Depression, the African-American composer and musician was zeitgeist incarnate. Steeped in the Texas blues tradition, he and jazz grew up together, as the brassy blare of big band swing gave way to bebop—a faster music for a faster, postwar world. At the luminous dawn of the Space Age and New York’s 1960s counterculture, Coleman gave voice to the moment. Lauded by some, maligned by many, he forged a breakaway art sometimes called “the new thing” or “free jazz.” Featuring previously unpublished photographs of Coleman and his contemporaries, this book tells the compelling story of one of America’s most adventurous musicians and the sound of a changing world.
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Orpheus in the Marketplace
Jacopo Peri and the Economy of Late Renaissance Florence
Tim Carter and Richard A. Goldthwaite
Harvard University Press, 2013

The Florentine musician Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) is known as the composer of the first operas--they include the earliest to survive complete, Euridice (1600), in which Peri sang the role of Orpheus. A large collection of recently discovered account books belonging to him and his family allows for a greater exploration of Peri's professional and personal life. Richard Goldthwaite, an economic historian, and Tim Carter, a musicologist, have done much more, however, than write a biography: their investigation exposes the remarkable value of such financial documents as a primary source for an entire period.

This record of Peri's wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and also opens a completely new perspective on one of Europe's principal centers of capitalism. His economic circumstances reflect continuities and transformations in Florentine society, and the strategies for negotiating them, under the Medici grand dukes. At the same time they allow a reevaluation of Peri the singer and composer that elucidates the cultural life of a major artistic center even in changing times, providing a quite different view of what it meant to be a musician in late Renaissance Italy.

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Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects
A Postmodern Perspective
Marguerite H. Rippy
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective traces the impact of legendary director Orson Welles on contemporary mass media entertainment and suggests that, ironically, we can see Welles’s performance genealogy most clearly in his unfinished RKO projects.

Author Marguerite H. Rippy provides the first in-depth examination of early film and radio projects shelved by RKO or by Welles himself. While previous studies of Welles largely fall into the categories of biography or modernist film studies, this book extends the understanding of Welles via postmodern narrative theory and performance analysis, weaving his work into the cultural and commercial background of its production. By identifying the RKO years as a critical moment in performance history, Rippy synthesizes scholarship that until now has been scattered among film studies, narrative theory, feminist critique, American studies, and biography.

Building a bridge between auteur and postmodern theories, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects offers a fresh look at Welles in his full complexity. Rippy trains a postmodern lens on Welles’s early projects and reveals four emerging narrative modes that came to define his work: deconstructions of the first-person singular; adaptations of classic texts for mass media; explorations of the self via primitivism; and examinations of the line between reality and fiction. These four narrative styles would greatly influence the development of modern mass media entertainment.

Rippy finds Welles’s legacy alive and well in today’s mockumentaries and reality television. It was in early, unfinished projects where Welles first toyed with fact and fiction, and the pleasure of this interplay still resonates with contemporary culture. As Rippy suggests, the logical conclusion of Welles’s career-long exploration of “truthiness” lies in the laughs of fake news shows. Offering an exciting glimpse of a master early in his career, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects documents Welles’s development as a storyteller who would shape culture for decades to come.

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Othello and Interpretive Traditions
Edward Pechter
University of Iowa Press, 1999
During the past twenty years or so, Othello has become the Shakespearean tragedy that speaks most powerfully to our contemporary concerns. Focusing on race and gender (and on class, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality), the play talks about what audiences want to talk about. Yet at the same time, as refracted through Iago, it forces us to hear what we do not want to hear; like the characters in the play, we become trapped in our own prejudicial malice and guilt.
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Our Land is Made of Courage and Glory
Nationalist Performance of Nicaragua and Guatemela
E. J. Westlake
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Our Land Is Made of Courage and Glory: Nationalist Performance of Nicaragua and Guatemala adds to a growing and timely body of work on nationalist drama. Examining important twentieth-century plays that few people have written about in English, E. J. Westlake analyzes the phenomenon of nation as performance by focusing on the definition of a people, national metaphors, and the uses of national history.

Westlake discerns the common characteristics that constitute nationalist plays, a genre that seeks to legitimate the nature of a nation by defining its boundaries, race, language, citizens, and history. Particularly relevant in an era influenced by imperialism, migration, and globalization, the volume probes the concepts of nation and nationalism in the context of postcolonial literary and performance theory.

Our Land Is Made of Courage and Glory covers the political and theatrical history of Nicaragua and Guatemala. Westlake examines how the blending of races factors into nationalism with a look at the play El tren amarillo by Manuel Galich and uses Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Soluna to show how nationalists appropriate Mayan culture to create a sense of the Guatemalan people and culture. She discusses the mapping of history as a linear progression in Alan Bolt’s Banana republic and as a cycle of patricide in Por los caminos van los campesinos by Pablo Cuadra. Westlake also suggests that Rolando Steiner’s La noche de Wiwilí, a play taken from an eyewitness account, acts as a site of official national memory, and she examines as well the canonizing of the folk ballet El Güegüence to further explore the notion of sites of memory versus lived memory.

Raising essential questions about the future of nationalism and nationalist performance, Our Land Is Made of Courage and Glory will be of interest to scholars and students in drama, Latin American theatre studies, political science, and history.

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Our Movie Heritage
McGreevey, Tom
Rutgers University Press, 1997
ÒOur Movie Heritage is both a vividly illustrated encyclopedia and a suspense story replete with heroes and heroines and an imperiled treasure of such great worth that one feels impelled to ride to its rescue.ÓÑOlivia deHavillandÒThis book reads like a suspense story. Will we care enough, it asks, to save the rest of our great movie heritage before itÕs too late?  For all of us who love the movies there can only be one answer.ÓÑFay Kanin, chair of the National Film Preservation Board

Our Movie Heritage should be read by anyone interested in motion picture history.  Without film preservation, there can be no valid film history.  Documents, autobiographies, oral histories, and secondary sources are of importance, but viewing the actual films preserved or restored to a state comparable to the way they were originally viewed is of inestimable importance.Rudy Behlmer, film historian and author of Memo from David O. Selznick

Our Movie Heritage is an enticing, up to the minute account of the complex National Film preservation effort, and should be read by anyone interested in our rich cinematic heritage.Mary Lea Bandy, chief curator, The Museum of Modern Art

 Imagine an America without any images of itself no Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz, no Orson Welles in Citizen Kane,  and no Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca.  Movies are an extraordinary personal and collective history of the American people. Unfortunately, over 90 percent of America's silent films are already lost to us, and more than half of the American feature films made before 1950 no longer exist. Whether it is a piece of cellulose nitrate exposed in 1910 or a strip of Eastman Color acetate stock produced in the 1970s all film self-destructs. Rapidly.

Our Movie Heritage is a highly readable and informative view of the world of film preservation, showing the work being done to save our national treasure trove of film history. Full of tales of discovery and rescue, the book is an urgent plea for preservation. Our Movie Heritage describes the race against time currently under way both in the public and private sectors in order to salvage what is left in vaults, theaters, and private collections. The book explains the basics of film preservation, covering the who, what, when, where, and how of the field, with top archivists and film restoration experts expressing their concerns and hopes for the future of movies. This beautifully produced book, with over one hundred pictures of top stars, directors, and film people, is itself a treasure that showcases the importance of this legacy.
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Our Own Sweet Sounds
A Celebration of Popular Music in Arkansas
Robert Cochran
University of Arkansas Press, 2005
A rich portrait of the community that is Arkansas manifested in song, Our Own Sweet Sounds celebrates the diversity of musical forms and music makers that have graced the state since territorial times. Beginning with the earliest references to Quapaw and Caddo music as first reported by seventeenth-century European explorers and continuing forward to the “bizarrely named grunge bands” who will be stars tomorrow, Robert Cochran traces the music and voices that have enriched the life of the Natural State. Arkansas, many are starting to realize, was caught in a cultural crossfire of music. There were the nearby western swing influence of Tulsa, the blues of Memphis, the Louisiana Hayride of Shreveport, and the influence of Ozark music from Missouri. All of this resulted in the Arkansas cross-culture of blues, country, folk, and rock music, creating a broad spectrum of musical styles and musicians that has left an indelible impression on the Arkansas cultural scene. This new edition includes approximately seventy new artists, some of whom became famous after 1996, when the first edition was published, such as Joe Nichols, and some of whom were left out of the original edition, such as Little Willie John. The valuable “Featured Performers” section—lengthy discussions of individual artists with their photographs—is now one-third larger. This new edition, heavily illustrated, is a loving tribute to the common music that has filled local airwaves, lifted community gatherings to the level of joyous festivities, and enlivened the spirit of music lovers everywhere.
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Out of Sync & Out of Work
History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture
Burges, Joel
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Out of Sync & Out of Work explores the representation of obsolescence, particularly of labor, in film and literature during a historical moment in which automation has intensified in capitalist economies. Joel Burges analyzes texts such as The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Wreck-It Ralph, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Iron Council, and examines their “means” of production. Those means include a range of subjects and narrative techniques, including the “residual means” of including classic film stills in a text, the “obstinate means” of depicting machine breaking, the “dated means” of employing the largely defunct technique of stop-motion animation, and the “obsolete” means of celebrating a labor strike. In every case, the novels and films that Burges scrutinizes call on these means to activate the reader’s/viewer’s awareness of historical time. Out of Sync & Out of Work advances its readers’ grasp of the complexities of historical time in contemporary culture, moving the study of temporality forward in film and media studies, literary studies, critical theory, and cultural critique.
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Out Takes
Essays on Queer Theory and Film
Ellis Hanson, ed.
Duke University Press, 1999
This collection brings together the work of both film scholars and queer theorists to advance a more sophisticated notion of queer film criticism. While the “politics of representation” has been the focus of much previous gay and lesbian film criticism, the contributors to Out Takes employ the approaches of queer theory to move beyond conventional readings and to reexamine aspects of the cinematic gaze in relation to queer desire and spectatorship.

The essays examine a wide array of films, including Calamity Jane, Rear Window, The Hunger, Heavenly Creatures, and Bound , and discuss such figures as Doris Day, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alfred Hitchcock. Divided into three sections, the first part reconsiders the construction of masculinity and male homoerotic desire—especially with respect to the role of women—in classic cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. The second section offers a deconstructive consideration of lesbian film spectatorship and lesbian representation. Part three looks at the historical trajectory of independent queer cinema, including works by H.D., Kenneth Anger, and Derek Jarman.

By exploring new approaches to the study of sexuality in film, Out Takes will be useful to scholars in gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, and cinema studies.

Contributors. Bonnie Burns, Steven Cohan, Alexander Doty, Lee Edelman, Michelle Elleray, Jim Ellis, Ellis Hanson, D. A. Miller, Eric Savoy, Matthew Tinkcom, Amy Villarejo, Jean Walton

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Outside Theater
Alliances That Shape Mexico
Stuart A. Day
University of Arizona Press, 2017

Taking a cue from influential French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who in The Emancipated Spectator rejects the idea of the passive, ignorant, duped spectators in need of instruction to become active, Stuart A. Day’s goal in Outside Theater is to highlight written words and performances that exemplify effective strategies, past and present, to reveal and promote civic engagement, to provoke disruptions, or to highlight fissures—and opportunities—in oppressive social structures.

Through the study of one or two primary models per chapter, as well as multiple examples in the introduction and conclusion, Day presents Mexican plays from 1905 to 2015, including the 2010 Mexico City performance of Zoot Suit by Chicano playwright Luis Valdez. Using these plays, Day explores the concept of “outside theater,” where people or groups translate the tools of the theatrical trade to a different stage, outside the walls of the theater, and play the part of fictional or real life Celestinas—matchmakers who unite seemingly disparate entities to promote social awareness and social action by working the borders between life and art.

Each work in this innovative analysis reveals productive social connections that, with the help of crucial artistic alliances, contradict the perception that art is somehow secondary to or disconnected from the public sphere of influence and the struggles of everyday life. With this book, Day shows that Mexican theater can and does bolster civil society and thus the country’s fragile democracy.

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Over Here, Over There
Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War I
Edited by William Brooks, Christina Bashford, and Gayle Magee
University of Illinois Press, 2019
During the Great War, composers and performers created music that expressed common sentiments like patriotism, grief, and anxiety. Yet music also revealed the complexities of the partnership between France, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. At times, music reaffirmed a commitment to the shared wartime mission. At other times, it reflected conflicting views about the war from one nation to another or within a single nation.Over Here, Over There examines how composition, performance, publication, recording, censorship, and policy shaped the Atlantic allies' musical response to the war. The first section of the collection offers studies of individuals. The second concentrates on communities, whether local, transnational, or on the spectrum in-between. Essay topics range from the sinking of the Lusitania through transformations of the entertainment industry to the influenza pandemic.Contributors: Christina Bashford, William Brooks, Deniz Ertan, Barbara L. Kelly, Kendra Preston Leonard, Gayle Magee, Jeffrey Magee, Michelle Meinhart, Brian C. Thompson, and Patrick Warfield
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Owning Performance | Performing Ownership
Literary Property and the Eighteenth-Century British Stage
Jane Wessel
University of Michigan Press, 2022
In 1710, England’s first copyright law gave authors the ability to own their works, but it was not until 1833 that literary property law was extended to protect dramatic performance. Between these dates, generations of playwrights grappled for control over their intellectual property in a cultural and legal environment that treated print differently from performance. As ownership became a central concern for many, actors fought to possess their dramatic parts exclusively, playwrights struggled to control and profit from repeat performances of their works, and managers tried to gain a monopoly over the performance of profitable plays.

Owning Performance follows the careers of some of the 18th century’s most influential playwrights, actors, and theater managers as they vied for control over the period’s most popular shows. Without protection for dramatic literary property, these figures developed creative
 extra-legal strategies for controlling the performance of drama—quite literally performing their ownership. Their various strategies resulted in a culture of ephemerality, with many of the period’s most popular works existing only in performance and manuscript copies. Author Jane Wessel explores how playwrights and actors developed strategies for owning their works and how, in turn, theater managers appropriated these strategies, putting constant pressure on artists to innovate. Owning Performance reveals the wide-reaching effects of property law on theatrical culture, tracing a turn away from print that affected the circulation, preservation, and legacy of 18th century drama.
 
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