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138 books match the query 'Meaning' and 2 start with s

cover of Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning

Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning

Norman Rabkin

University of Chicago Press, 1981

"Rabkin selects The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Richard III, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest as the plays on which to build his argument, and he teaches us a great deal about these plays. . . . To convince the unbelievingthat that the plays do mean, but that the meaning is coterminous with the experience of the plays themselves, Rabkin finds a strategy more subtle than thesis and rational argument, a strategy designed to make us see for ourselves why thematic descriptions are inadequate, see for ourselves tath the plays mean more than and statement about them can ever suggest." –Barbara A. Mowat, Auburn University

"Norman Rabkin's new book is a very different kind of good book. Elegantly spare, sharp, undogmatic. . . . The relationship between the perception of unity and the perception of artistic achievement is a basic conundrum, and it is one that Mr. Rabkin has courageously placed at the center of his discussion." –G. K. Hunter, Sewanee Review

"Rabkin's book is brilliant, taut, concise, beautifully argued, and sensitively responsive to the individuality of particular Shakespeare plays." –Anne Barton, New York Review of Books
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cover of Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning

Simming

Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning

Scott Magelssen

University of Michigan Press, 2014

At an ecopark in Mexico, tourists pretend to be illegal migrants, braving inhospitable terrain and the U.S. Border Patrol as they attempt to cross the border. At a living history museum in Indiana, daytime visitors return after dark to play fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. In the Mojave Desert, the U.S. Army simulates entire provinces of Iraq and Afghanistan, complete with bustling villages, insurgents, and Arabic-speaking townspeople, to train soldiers for deployment to the Middle East. At a nursing home, trainees put on fogged glasses and earplugs, thick bands around their finger joints, and sandbag harnesses to simulate the effects of aging and to gain empathy for their patients.

These immersive environments in which spectator-participants engage in simulations of various kinds—or “simming”—are the subject of Scott Magelssen’s book. His book lays out the ways in which simming can provide efficacy and promote social change through affective, embodied testimony. Using methodology from theater history and performance studies (particularly as these fields intersect with cultural studies, communication, history, popular culture, and American studies), Magelssen explores the ways these representational practices produce, reify, or contest cultural and societal perceptions of identity.

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