Download or read book Staging Modern American Life written by T. Fahy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Fahy examines the integration of and challenges to popular culture found in the theatrical works of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, which have largely been marginalized in discussions of theatre history and literary studies, despite offering a hybrid theatre that integrates popular with formal, and mainstream with experimental
Download or read book Staging Depth written by Joel Pfister and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until now, Eugene O'Neill's psychological dramas have been analyzed mainly by critics who relied on obvious parallels between O'Neill's life, his family, and his plays. In this theoretically expansive and interdisciplinary book, Joel Pfister reassesses what was at stake ideologically in O'Neill's staging and modernizing of 'psychological' individualism for his social class. Pfister examines the history of the middle-class family and of Freudian pop psychology in the 1910s and 1920s to reconstruct the cultural conditions for the imagining and popularizing of 'depth,' a trope that was central to O'Neill's dramatic vision. He also recovers provocative critiques by contemporary critics on the Left who challenged O'Neill's preoccupation with dramatizing psychological, familial, and aesthetic 'depth.' One of the few sustained works on O'Neill in recent years, this wide-ranging book makes a major contribution to cultural studies, to the history of subjectivity, and to scholarship on the ideological origins of modernism and modern American drama. Originally published in 1995. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Download or read book Re Constructing Maternal Performance in Twentieth Century American Drama written by L. Bailey McDaniel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-09-04 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at a century of American theatre, McDaniel investigates how race-based notions of maternal performance become sites of resistance to cultural and political hierarchies. This book considers how the construction of mothering as universally women's work obscures additional, equally constructed subdivisions based in race and class.
Download or read book Like One of the Family written by Fiona Mills and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 best-selling novel The Help and its subsequent 2011 film center on the experiences of African-American domestic workers living in Jackson, Mississippi. Stockett’s sanitized portrayal of life in the Deep South where black women were charged with rearing white children while concurrently barred from sharing toilets and common eating areas with their employers simultaneously enthralled and disturbed readers and viewers alike. Notably, it is not the domestics themselves who render their tales but rather Eugenia Phelan, a white, twenty-something Mississippian with whom they hesitantly collaborate, who ultimately “voices” their stories of life during the harrowing early days of the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South. Essentially, these stories are articulated through the voice of a white woman; a fact that becomes even more complex when one acknowledges that this fictional tale of the inner life of black maids working in Jackson, Mississippi, one of the most notorious states in regards to racial atrocities suffered during the mid-twentieth century, is rendered through the words of a white southern writer. Despite the book’s positive public reception, its sentimental portrait of the lives of African-American domestic workers is troubling due to its heavy-handed use of dialect and “feel good” message about the admirable interventions of a white protagonist intent on alleviating some suffering while glossing over the vicious attacks on African-Americans during the Civil Rights era. The issue of visibility/invisibility is central in this text. At its most basic level, the text itself has lacked traditional critical visibility, as, currently, there has been a dearth of academic books focusing on this specific novel, although the novel and subsequent film received much attention in national newspapers and magazines, as well as significant critical debate in a wide variety of online venues. This collection considers why such sterilized versions of America’s complex racial history resonate so deeply in our contemporary timeframe. Essay topics range from examinations of the laboring black female body to the impact of domestic work on families, both black and white, to explorations of the connections between rhetoric, writing and race. Also included are several comparative pieces that draw connections between Stockett’s work and that of 1940s cartoonist Jackie Ormes, as well as filmic comparisons to Imitation of Life (1934 and 1959) and Black Girl (1966) by Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. With a “Preface” by Trudier Harris and the inclusion of several essays previously published in Southern Quarterly and Southern Cultures, this volume represents the first text dedicated solely to Stockett’s wildly popular novel and its subsequent film adaptation.
Download or read book Adapting Western Classics for the Chinese Stage written by Shouhua Qi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adapting Western Classics for the Chinese Stage presents a comprehensive study of transnational, transcultural, and translingual adaptations of Western classics from the turn of the twentieth century to present-day China in the age of globalization. Supported by a wide range of in-depth research, this book Examines the complex dynamics between texts, both dramatic and socio-historical; contexts, both domestic and international; and intertexts, Western classics and their Chinese reinterpretations in huaju and/or traditional Chinese xiqu; Contemplates Chinese adaptations of a range of Western dramatic works, including Greek, English, Russian, and French; Presents case studies of key Chinese adaptation endeavors, including the 1907 adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by the Spring Willow Society and the 1990 adaptation of Hamlet by Lin Zhaohua; Lays out a history of uneasy convergence of East and West, complicated by tensions between divergent sociopolitical forces and cultural proclivities. Drawing on disciplines and critical perspectives, including theatre and adaptation studies, comparative literature, translation studies, reception theory, post-colonialism, and intertextuality, this book is key reading for students and researchers in any of these fields.
Download or read book The Arts of Imprisonment written by Leonidas K. Cheliotis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The arts - spanning the visual, design, performing, media, musical, and literary genres - constitute an alternative lens through which to understand state-sanctioned punishment and its place in public consciousness. Perhaps this is especially so in the case of imprisonment: its nature, its functions, and the ways in which these register in public perceptions and desires, have historically and to some extent inherently been intertwined with the arts. But the products of this intertwinement have by no means been constant or uniform. Indeed, just as exploring imprisonment and its public meanings through the lens of the arts may reveal hitherto obscured instances of social control within or outside prisons, so too it may uncover a rich and possibly inspirational archive of resistance to them. This edited collection sheds light both on state use of the arts for the purposes of controlling prisoners and the broader public, and the use made of the arts by prisoners and portions of the broader public as tools of resistance to penal states. The book also includes a number of chapters that address arts-in-prisons programmes, making distinctive contributions to the literature on their philosophy, formation, operation, effectiveness, and research evaluation, as well as taking care to explore the politics surrounding and underpinning these multiple themes.
Download or read book Zarzuela written by Janet Lynn Sturman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once the most popular form of Spanish entertainment short of the bullfight, the zarzuela boasts a long history of bridging the categories of classical and popular art. It is neither opera nor serious drama, yet it requires both trained singers and good actors. The content is neither purely folkloric nor high art; it is too popular for some and too classical for others. In Zarzuela, Janet L. Sturman assesses the political as well as the musical significance of this chameleon of music-drama. Sturman traces the zarzuela's colorful history from its seventeenth-century origins as a Spanish court entertainment to its adaptation in Spain's colonial outposts in the New World. She examines Cuba's pivotal role in transmitting the zarzuela to Latin America and the Caribbean and draws distinctions among the ways in which various Spanish-speaking communities have reformulated zarzuela, combining elements of the Spanish model with local characters, music, dances, and political perspectives. The settings Sturman considers include Argentina, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the American cities of El Paso, Miami, and New York. Sturman also demonstrates how the zarzuela plays a role in defining American urban ethnicity. She offers a glimpse into two longstanding theaters in New York, Repertorio Espa ol and the Thalia Spanish Theatre, that have fostered the tradition of zarzuela, mounting innovative productions and cultivating audiences. Sturman constructs a profile of the audience that supports modern zarzuela and examines the extensive personal network that sustains it financially. Just as the zarzuela afforded an opportunity in the past for Spaniards to assert their individuality in the face of domination by Italian and central European musical standards, it continues to stand for a distinctive Hispanic legacy. Zarzuela provides a major advance in recognizing the enduring cultural and social significance of this resilient and adaptable genre.
Download or read book In and Out of Sight written by Alix Beeston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Building on work in visual culture studies that emphasizes the interplay between still and moving images, In and Out of Sight provides a new account of the relationship between photography and modernist writing--revealing the conceptual space of literary modernism to be radically constructed around the instability of female bodies"--
Download or read book Craft Class written by Christopher Kempf and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor. In a letter dated September 1, 1912, drama professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term "workshop" for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with former students at Harvard and Radcliffe. This was the first time that term, now ubiquitous, was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Today, the MFA (master of fine arts) industry is a booming one, with more than 200 programs and thousands of residencies and conferences for aspiring writers nationwide. Almost all of these offerings operate on the workshop model. In Craft Class, Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies, the workshop, has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshaled craft toward economic critique, craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industry grew. Transcoding professional-managerial soft skills—linguistic facility, social and emotional discernment, symbolic fluency—in the language of manual labor, the workshop nostalgically invokes practices that the university itself has rendered obsolete. The workshop poem or short story thus shares discursive space with the craft IPA or hand-loomed Pottery Barn rug—a space in which one economic practice rewrites itself in the language of another, just as right-wing corporatism continuously rewrites itself in the language of populism. Delineating an arc that extends from Boston's fin de siècle Society of Arts and Crafts through 1930s proletarian workshops to the pedagogies of Black Mountain College and the postwar MFA, Craft Class reveals how present-day creative writing restructures transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. With the rise of the workshop in American culture, Kempf shows, manual and mental labor have been welded together like steel plates. What fissures does that weld seal shut? And on whose behalf does the poet punch in?
Download or read book The Drama of the Double written by Katherine H. Burkman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the way in which doubling takes place in several novels, films, and dramas, primarily focusing on modern drama and exploring how five Greek myths – Oedipus, Narcissus, Dionysus, Orestes, and Demeter – inform the literature. Taking a psychological/mythical approach, this book explores the inner divisions that lead to boundary loss and the search for the self that may lead to boundaries found. The contention of the book is that the oedipal search for self has been replaced in modern literature by individuals caught up in a narcissistic culture. Katherine H. Burkman explores plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Marsha Norman, and Will Eno.
Download or read book Sam Shepard and the Aesthetics of Performance written by E. Creedon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-22 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By concentrating on Sam Shepard's visual aesthetics, Emma Creedon argues that a consideration of Shepard's plays in the context of visual and theoretical Surrealism illuminates our understanding of his experimental approach to drama.
Download or read book Staging Gay Lives written by John M Clum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of ten contemporary plays, by writers who reflect a range of cultural origins, about male homosexuality.
Download or read book Moral Problems in American Life written by Karen Halttunen and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume surveys the moral landscape of the American past from slavery to the Vietnam War. The 14 contributing historians illuminate this critical dimension of American history, showing how historical study contributes to present-day debates about values and the moral life.
Download or read book Staging Women s Lives in Academia written by Michelle A. Massé and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Women's Lives in Academia demonstrates how ostensibly personal decisions are shaped by institutions and advocates for ways that workplaces, not women, must be changed. Addressing life stages ranging from graduate school through retirement, these essays represent a gamut of institutions and women who draw upon both personal experience and scholarly expertise. The contributors contemplate the slipperiness of the very categories we construct to explain the stages of life and ask key questions, such as what does it mean to be a graduate student at fifty? Or a full professor at thirty-five? The book explores the ways women in all stages of academia feel that they are always too young or too old, too attentive to work or too overly focused on family. By including the voices of those who leave, as well as those who stay, this collection signals the need to rebuild the house of academia so that women can have not only classrooms of their own but also lives of their own.
Download or read book Authoring Performance written by A. Sidiropoulou and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-11-16 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical, theoretical, and comparative study of the emergence of the director-as-author phenomenon, posing questions of authorship and redefining the relationship between 'playwright' and the director-playwright.
Download or read book E E Cummings Modernism and the Classics written by J. Alison Rosenblitt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a major, ground-breaking study of the modernist E. E. Cummings' engagement with the classics. With his experimental form and syntax, his irreverence, and his rejection of the highbrow, there are probably few current readers who would name Cummings if asked to identify 20th-century Anglophone poets in the Classical tradition. But for most of his life, and even for ten or twenty years after his death, this is how many readers and critics did see Cummings. He specialised in the study of classical literature as an undergraduate at Harvard, and his contemporaries saw him as a 'pagan' poet or a 'Juvenalian' satirist, with an Aristophanic sense of humour. In E.E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics, Alison Rosenblitt aims to recover for the contemporary reader this lost understanding of Cummings as a classicizing poet. The book also includes an edition of previously unpublished work by Cummings himself, unearthed from archival research. For the first time, the reader has access to the full scope of Cummings' translations from Horace, Homer, and Greek drama, as well as two short pieces of classically-related prose, a short 'Alcaics' and a previously unknown and classicizing parody of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This new work is exciting in its own right and essential to understanding Cummings' development as a poet.
Download or read book Theatre and War written by J. Colleran and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has the media since the First Gulf War altered political analysis and how has this alteration has in turn affected socially-critical art? Colleran examines more than forty plays, many written in direct response to the 1991 war in Iraq as well as to the 9/11 attacks and the retaliatory actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
