Staging Civilization

Staging Civilization PDF Author: Rahul Markovits
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813945550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Eighteenth-century France is understood to have been the dominant cultural power on that era’s international scene. Considering the emblematic case of the theater, Rahul Markovits goes beyond the idea of "French Europe" to offer a serious consideration of the intentions and goals of those involved in making this so. Drawing on extensive archival research, Staging Civilization reveals that between 1670 and 1815 at least twenty-seven European cities hosted resident theater troupes composed of French actors and singers who performed French-language repertory. By examining the presence of French companies of actors in a wide set of courts and cities throughout Europe, Markovits uncovers the complex mechanisms underpinning the dissemination of French culture. The book ultimately offers a revisionist account of the traditional Europe française thesis, engaging topics such as transnational labor history, early-modern court culture and republicanism, soft power, and cultural imperialism.

Staging Civilization

Staging Civilization PDF Author: Rahul Markovits
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813945550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
Eighteenth-century France is understood to have been the dominant cultural power on that era’s international scene. Considering the emblematic case of the theater, Rahul Markovits goes beyond the idea of "French Europe" to offer a serious consideration of the intentions and goals of those involved in making this so. Drawing on extensive archival research, Staging Civilization reveals that between 1670 and 1815 at least twenty-seven European cities hosted resident theater troupes composed of French actors and singers who performed French-language repertory. By examining the presence of French companies of actors in a wide set of courts and cities throughout Europe, Markovits uncovers the complex mechanisms underpinning the dissemination of French culture. The book ultimately offers a revisionist account of the traditional Europe française thesis, engaging topics such as transnational labor history, early-modern court culture and republicanism, soft power, and cultural imperialism.

Staging the World

Staging the World PDF Author: Rebecca E. Karl
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822383527
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
In Staging the World Rebecca E. Karl rethinks the production of nationalist discourse in China during the late Qing period, between China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the proclamation of the Republic in 1911. She argues that at this historical moment a growing Chinese identification with what we now call the Third World first made the modern world visible as a totality and that the key components of Chinese nationalist discourse developed in reference to this worldview. The emergence of Chinese nationalism during this period is often portrayed as following from China’s position vis-à-vis Japan and the West. Karl has mined the archives of the late Qing period to discern the foci of Chinese intellectuals from 1895 to 1911 to assert that even though the China/Japan/West triangle was crucial, it alone is an incomplete—and therefore flawed—model of the development of nationalism in China. Although the perceptions and concerns of these thinkers form the basis of Staging the World, Karl begins by examining a 1904 Shanghai production of an opera about a fictional partition of Poland and its modern reincarnation as an ethno-nation. By focusing on the type of dialogue this opera generated in China, Karl elucidates concepts such as race, colonization, globalization, and history. From there, she discusses how Chinese conceptions of nationalism were affected by the “discovery” of Hawai’i as a center of the Pacific, the Philippine revolution against the United States, and the relationship between nationality and ethnicity made apparent by the Boer War in South Africa.

The Conquest of Ruins

The Conquest of Ruins PDF Author: Julia Hell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022658819X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 633

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Book Description
The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in The Conquest of Ruins, what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginations isn’t that empire’s glory but its fall—and the haunting monuments left in its wake. Hell examines centuries of European empire-building—from Charles V in the sixteenth century and Napoleon’s campaigns of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the atrocities of Mussolini and the Third Reich in the 1930s and ’40s—and sees a similar fascination with recreating the Roman past in the contemporary image. In every case—particularly that of the Nazi regime—the ruins of Rome seem to represent a mystery to be solved: how could an empire so powerful be brought so low? Hell argues that this fascination with the ruins of greatness expresses a need on the part of would-be conquerors to find something to ward off a similar demise for their particular empire.

Staging the Past

Staging the Past PDF Author: Judith Schlehe
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839414814
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Popular representations of history are taking on new forms and reaching wider audiences. The search for usable pasts is branching out into active appropriations of history such as historical theme parks, housing developments, and live-action role play. Drawing on themed environments across the continents, the articles in this volume focus on how these appropriations bypass, are different from, or even contradict traditional as well as scientific modes of disseminating historical knowledge. Bringing together theorists and practitioners, they provide the basis for an interdisciplinary as well as a transcultural theory of how pasts are staged in various social contexts.

Staging the Ottoman Turk

Staging the Ottoman Turk PDF Author: Esin Akalin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 3838269195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
In the wake of the fear that gripped Europe after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, English dramatists, like their continental counterparts, began representing the Ottoman Turks in plays inspired by historical events. The Ottoman milieu as a dramatic setting provided English audiences with a common experience of fascination and fear of the Other. The stereotyping of the Turks in these plays—revolving around complex themes such as tyranny, captivity, war, and conquests—arose from their perception of Islam. The Ottomans' failure in the second siege of Vienna in 1683 led to the reversal of trends in the representation of the Turks on stage. As the ascending strength of a web of European alliances began to check Ottoman expansion, what then began to dazzle the aesthetic imagination of eighteenth century England was the sultan's seraglio with images of extravaganza and decadence. In this book, Esin Akalin draws upon a selective range of seventeenth and eighteenth century plays to reach an understanding, both from a non-European perspective and Western standpoint, how one culture represents the other through discourse, historiography, and drama. The book explores a cluster of issues revolving around identity and difference in terms of history, ideology, and the politics of representation. In contextualizing political, cultural, and intellectual roots in the ideology of representing the Ottoman/Muslim as the West’s Other, the author tackles with the questions of how history serves literature and to what extent literature creates history.

Teaching as the Art of Staging

Teaching as the Art of Staging PDF Author: Anthony Weston
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000980324
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
College teachers all too often still play Sage on the Stage – lecturing to rooms full of passive and supposedly absorbed students. The cutting-edge opposite is still supposed to be the Guide on the Side – facilitating wherever students themselves are already going, mentoring and coaching them along the way. But who says that these are the only – or the best – alternatives? This book advances another and sharply different model: the Impresario with a Scenario, a teacher who serves as class mobilizer, improviser, and energizer, staging dramatic, often unexpected and self-unfolding learning challenges and adventures with students.In this book, the author argues that to pose a single alternative to lecturing is profoundly limiting. In fact, he says there is no reason to have to choose between “student-centered” and “teacher-centered” pedagogies. The best ways to teach and learn are both. The same applies to the false choice between “active” students and “active” teachers – there can be more than enough activity for everyone. In particular, the author argues that we need a model in which the teacher is notably pro-active – a kind of activity for which certain theatrical metaphors seem especially appropriate.Picture a college teacher who regularly sets up classroom scenarios – challenging problems, unscripted dramas, role-plays, simulations, and the like – such that the scenario itself frames and drives most of the action and learning that follows. For teaching as staging, the primary work of the teacher is staging such scenarios. The basic goal is to put students into an urgently engaging and self-unfolding scenario, trusting them to carry it forward, while being prepared to join in as needed.This book offers a conceptual and practical framework for Teaching as Staging, grounding the approach with illustrative and sometimes provocative narrative from the literature as well as the author’s own practice.Teaching as the Art of Staging offers a visionary challenge to the prevailing models of pedagogy. The book presents a thoroughly practical model that opens up new possibilities for anyone interested in dramatic new directions in teaching and learning.

Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China

Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China PDF Author: Hsiao-t'i Li
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684171016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
"Popular operas in late imperial China were a major part of daily entertainment, and were also important for transmitting knowledge of Chinese culture and values. In the twentieth century, however, Chinese operas went through significant changes. During the first four decades of the 1900s, led by Xin Wutai (New Stage) of Shanghai and Yisushe of Xi’an, theaters all over China experimented with both stage and scripts to present bold new plays centering on social reform. Operas became closely intertwined with social and political issues. This trend toward “politicization” was to become the most dominant theme of Chinese opera from the 1930s to the 1970s, when ideology-laden political plays reflected a radical revolutionary agenda.Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, this book focuses on the reformed operas staged in Shanghai and Xi’an. By presenting extensive information on both traditional/imperial China and revolutionary/Communist China, it reveals the implications of these “modern” operatic experiences and the changing features of Chinese operas throughout the past five centuries. Although the different genres of opera were watched by audiences from all walks of life, the foundations for opera’s omnipresence completely changed over time."

Staging Decadence

Staging Decadence PDF Author: Adam Alston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350237051
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
How is decadence being staged today – as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value – namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse – and what might lie in its wake.

Staging Tianxia

Staging Tianxia PDF Author: Lanlan Kuang
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253070929
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Staging Tianxia explores the ancient Chinese vision of world order known as tianxia (all under heaven) by focusing on the historical, performative, and rhetorical processes of expressive arts and cultural heritages that inform a vision of China as a historically multiethnic and cosmopolitan nation. Author Lanlan Kuang unites multimedia ethnographic research and theoretical insights from ethnomusicology, philosophy, religious studies, performance studies, and cognitive science, with a focus on Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a modern interpretation inserted into the Chinese classical dance and theatrical arts tradition. Staging Tianxia thus aims to redefine Silk Road studies and Dunhuangology, a transdisciplinary field dedicated to studying the texts and art of Dunhuang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that connected China via the Silk Road with Central Asia, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Staging Tianxia is a careful ethnographic study that looks at the importance of performance tradition and poetics in the arts and aesthetic theory of China.

The Creation of the Cowboy Hero

The Creation of the Cowboy Hero PDF Author: Jeremy Agnew
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 078647839X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
As business interests have commercialized the American West and publishers and studios have created compelling imagery, the expectations of readers and moviegoers have influenced perceptions of the cowboy as a hero. This book describes the evolution of the cowboy hero as a mythic persona created by dime novels, television and Hollywood. Much of our concept of the cowboy comes to us from movies and the book's main focus is his changing image in cinema. The development of the hero image and the fictional West is traced from early novels and films to the present, along with shifting audience expectations and economic pressures.