Download or read book Opera In The Flesh written by Sam Abel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-26 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Verdi, Wagner, polymorphous perversion, Puccini, Brunnhilde, Pinkerton, and Parsifal all rub shoulders in this delightful, poetic, insightful, sexual book sprung by one man's physical response to the power and exaggeration we call opera. Sam Abel applies a light touch as he considers the topic of opera and the eroticized body: Why do audiences respond to opera in a visceral way? How does opera, like no other art form, physically move watchers? How and why does opera arouse feelings akin to sexual desire? Abel seeks the answers to these questions by examining homoerotic desire, the phenomenon of the castrati, operatic cross-dressing, and opera as presented through the media. In this deeply personal book, Abel writes, ‘These pages map my current struggles to pin down my passion for opera, my intense admiration for its aesthetic forms and beauties, but much more they express my astonishment at how opera makes me lose myself, how it consumes me.’ In so doing, Abel uncovers what until now, through dry musicology and gossipy history, has been left behind a wall of silence: the physical and erotic nature of opera. Although Abel can speak with certainty only about his own response to opera, he provides readers with a language and a resonance with which to understand their own experiences. Ultimately, Opera in the Flesh celebrates the power of opera to move audiences as no other book has done. It is indeed a treasure of scholarship, passion, and poetry for everyone with even a passing interest in this fascinating art form.
Download or read book Monsieur written by Jean-Philippe Toussaint and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hero, Monsieur, is a successful young executive in Paris whose daily life is examined with precision. He is nothing if not unremarkable. Here, he muses on everything from the night sky to a Rotring pen. And he is very funny.
Download or read book War Culture and Society 1750 1850 written by Rafe Blaufarb and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Revolution in Language written by Sophia A. Rosenfeld and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between the ideas of the Enlightenment and the culture and ideology of the French Revolution? This book takes up that classic question by concentrating on changing conceptions of language and, especially, signs during the second half of the eighteenth century. The author traces, first, the emergence of a new interest in the possibility of gestural communication within the philosophy, theater, and pedagogy of the last decades of the Old Regime. She then explores the varied uses and significance of a variety of semiotic experiments, including the development of a sign language for the deaf, within the language politics of the Revolution. A Revolution in Language shows not only that many key revolutionary thinkers were unusually preoccupied by questions of language, but also that prevailing assumptions about words and other signs profoundly shaped revolutionaries' efforts to imagine and to institute an ideal polity between 1789 and the start of the new century. This book reveals the links between Enlightenment epistemology and the development of modern French political culture.
Download or read book Revolutionary News written by Jeremy D. Popkin and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The newspaper press was an essential aspect of the political culture of the French Revolution. Revolutionary News highlights the most significant features of this press in clear and vivid language. It breaks new ground in examining not only the famous journalists but the obscure publishers and the anonymous readers of the Revolutionary newspapers. Popkin examines the way press reporting affected Revolutionary crises and the way in which radical journalists like Marat and the Pere Duchene used their papers to promote democracy.
Download or read book Ending the Terror written by Bronislaw Baczko and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-07-28 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major assessment of a crucial moment in the history of the French Revolution - the fall of Robespierre in July 1794.
Download or read book Choosing Terror written by Marisa Linton and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-06-20 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the leaders of the French Revolution - Robespierre and his fellow Jacobins - and particularly the gradual process whereby many of them came to 'choose terror', evolving from humanitarian idealists into ruthless politicians, ready to adopt the use of terror to defend the Revolution.
Download or read book Jewish American Literature written by Jules Chametzky and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001 with total page 1264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of Jewish-American literature written by various authors between 1656 and 1990.
Download or read book Blind written by Sophie Calle and published by Actes Sud Editions. This book was released on 2011 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No stranger to the art of staging and to the act of disclosure, Sophie Caile returns again here to the theme of autobiography and to the notion of the Other, revealing in all their difference and singularity those who have been blind since birth or who have gone blind following an accident. By establishing a dialectic between the testimonies of several generations of blind people and the photographs taken by her on the basis on these accounts, Sophie Caile offers readers a reflection on absence, on the loss of one sense and the compensation of another, on the notion of the visible and the invisible. In this publication, she revisits three earlier works constructed and conceived around the idea ofblindness, setting up a dialogue between them; in Les Aveugles (The Blind), created in 1986, she questioned blind people on their representation of beauty; in 1991, in La Couleur aveugle (Blind Colour), she asked non-sighted people what they perceived and compared their descriptions to artists musings on the monochrome; La Dernière Image (The Last Image), produced in 2010 in Istanbul, historically dubbed the city of the blind, gives a voice to men and women who have lost their sight, questioning them on the last image they can remember, their last memory of the visible world. The work, which is structured as an introspective triptych, uncovers sensibilities, perceptions and events that are painful, sincere. Sophie Calles idea is to underline the permanence and irony of a particular situation, with the aim of redeeming and highlighting the importance of sight.
Download or read book The Politics of the Provisional written by Richard Taws and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In revolutionary France the life of things could not be assured. War, shortage of materials, and frequent changes in political authority meant that few large-scale artworks or permanent monuments to the Revolution’s memory were completed. On the contrary, visual practice in revolutionary France was characterized by the production and circulation of a range of transitional, provisional, ephemeral, and half-made images and objects, from printed paper money, passports, and almanacs to temporary festival installations and relics of the demolished Bastille. Addressing this mass of images conventionally ignored in art history, The Politics of the Provisional contends that they were at the heart of debates on the nature of political authenticity and historical memory during the French Revolution. Thinking about material durability, this book suggests, was one of the key ways in which revolutionaries conceptualized duration, and it was crucial to how they imagined the Revolution’s transformative role in history. The Politics of the Provisional is the first book in the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thanks to the AHPI grant, this book is available on a variety of popular e-book platforms.
Download or read book The Vanishing Children of Paris written by Arlette Farge and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993-10 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spring of 1750 children began to disappear from the streets of Paris as they made their way to school, as they ran errands for their parents, even from the presence of their parents-- no child was safe. Astonishing rumors quickly spread ... In fact, the police had been given sweeping powers of arrest to control the problems of vagrancy; some were clearly abusing that power. An atmosphere of mounting fear and suspicion between the populace and the police erupted in a two-day series of riots which culminated in the lynching and murder of an alleged abductor. The authors use this incident to view broader issues concerning the power of rumor, the logic of mob psychology, and the exercise of authority and the maintenance of peace in Paris under the Ancien Régime.
Download or read book The Devil in the Holy Water or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon written by Robert Darnton and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2009-11-27 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slander has always been a nasty business, Robert Darnton notes, but that is no reason to consider it a topic unworthy of inquiry. By destroying reputations, it has often helped to delegitimize regimes and bring down governments. Nowhere has this been more the case than in eighteenth-century France, when a ragtag group of literary libelers flooded the market with works that purported to expose the wicked behavior of the great. Salacious or seditious, outrageous or hilarious, their books and pamphlets claimed to reveal the secret doings of kings and their mistresses, the lewd and extravagant activities of an unpopular foreign-born queen, and the affairs of aristocrats and men-about-town as they consorted with servants, monks, and dancing masters. These libels often mixed scandal with detailed accounts of contemporary history and current politics. And though they are now largely forgotten, many sold as well as or better than some of the most famous works of the Enlightenment. In The Devil in the Holy Water, Darnton—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France and author of his own best-sellers, The Great Cat Massacre and George Washington's False Teeth—offers a startling new perspective on the origins of the French Revolution and the development of a revolutionary political culture in the years after 1789. He opens with an account of the colony of French refugees in London who churned out slanderous attacks on public figures in Versailles and of the secret agents sent over from Paris to squelch them. The libelers were not above extorting money for pretending to destroy the print runs of books they had duped the government agents into believing existed; the agents were not above recognizing the lucrative nature of such activities—and changing sides. As the Revolution gave way to the Terror, Darnton demonstrates, the substance of libels changed while the form remained much the same. With the wit and erudition that has made him one of the world's most eminent historians of eighteenth-century France, he here weaves a tale so full of intrigue that it may seem too extravagant to be true, although all its details can be confirmed in the archives of the French police and diplomatic service. Part detective story, part revolutionary history, The Devil in the Holy Water has much to tell us about the nature of authorship and the book trade, about Grub Street journalism and the shaping of public opinion, and about the important work that scurrilous words have done in many times and places.
Download or read book Massacre at the Champ de Mars written by David Andress and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2000 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 17 July 1791 the revolutionary National Guard of Paris opened fire on a crowd of protesters: citizens believing themselves patriots trying to save France from the reinstatement of a traitor king. To the National Guard and their political superiors the protesters were the dregs of the people, brigands paid by counter-revolutionary aristocrats. Politicians and journalists declared the National Guard the patriots, and their action a heroic defence of the fledgling Constitution.
Download or read book The Police and the People written by Richard Cobb and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1970 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Terror of Natural Right written by Dan Edelstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.
Download or read book The Ubu Plays written by Jeff Goode and published by Baker's Plays. This book was released on 1997-09 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book I Remember written by Georges Perec and published by Gallic Books. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Perec is serious fun' The Guardian Both an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring memoir, Georges Perec's I Remember is now available in English to UK readers for the first time, with an introduction by David Bellos. In 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with 'I remember', Perec records a stream of individual memories of a childhood in post-war France, while posing wider questions about memory and nostalgia. As playful and puzzling as the best of his novels, I Remember is an ode to life: the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the sometimes trivial, as seen through the eyes of the irreplaceable Georges Perec.