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Ambiguous Antidotes: Virtue as Vaccine for Vice in Early Modern Spain
by Hilaire KallendorfChastity and lust, charity and greed, humility and pride, are but some of the virtues and vices that have been in tension since Prudentius’ Psychomachia, written in the fifth century. While there has been widespread agreement within a given culture about what exactly constitutes a virtue or a vice, are these categories so consistent after all? In Ambiguous Antidotes, Hilaire Kallendorf explores the receptions of Virtues in the realm of moral philosophy and the artistic production it influenced during the Spanish Gold Age. Using the Derridian notion of pharmakon, a powerful substance that can serve as poison and cure, Kallendorf’s original and pioneering insight into five key Virtues (justice, fortitude, chastity, charity, and prudence) reveals an intriguing but messy relationship. Rather than being seen as unambiguously good antidotes, the Virtues are instead contested spaces where competing sets of values jostled for primacy and hegemony. Employing an arsenal of tools drawn from literary theory and cultural studies Ambiguous Antidotes confirms that you can in fact have too much of a good thing.
Amédée, The New Tenant, Victims of Duty: Three Plays (Books That Changed the World)
by Eugène IonescoThree hilarious and provocative plays by the absurdist pioneer who remains “one of the most important and influential figures in the modern theater” (Library Journal).The author of such modern classics as The Bald Soprano, Exit the King, Rhinoceros, and The Chairs, Eugene Ionesco’s plays have become emblematic of Absurdist theatre and the French avant-garde. This essential collection combines The New Tenant with Amédée and Victims of Duty—plays Richard Gilman has called, along with The Killer, Ionesco’s “greatest plays, works of the same solidity, fulness, and permanence as [those of] his predecessors in the dramatic revolution that began with Ibsen and is still going on.”In Amédée, the title character and his wife have a problem—not so much the corpse in their bedroom as the fact that it’s been there for fifteen years and is now growing, slowly but surely crowding them out of their apartment.In The New Tenant, a similar crowding is caused by an excess of furniture—as Harold Hobson said in the London Times, “there is not a dramatist . . . who can make furniture speak as eloquently as Ionesco, and here he makes it the perfect, the terrifying symbol of the deranged mind.”In Victims of Duty, Ionesco parodies the conformity of modern life by plunging his characters into an obscure search for “mallot with a t.”
The Amen Corner: A Play (Vintage International)
by James BaldwinFrom one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century—a masterpiece of the modern American theater: a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons."[Baldwin] uses words as the sea uses waves." —Langston HughesIn his first work for the theater, James Baldwin brought all the fervor and majestic rhetoric of the storefront churches of his childhood along with an unwavering awareness of the price those churches exacted from their worshipers. For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her Harlem congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when Margaret's estranged husband, a scapegrace jazz musician, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path.
The America Play and Other Works
by Suzan-Lori Parks"Parks has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way.... She's passionate and jokey and some kind of genius."--Vogue
America Under the Influence: Drinking, Culture, and Immersive Performance (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Chloë Rae EdmonsonIn this book, Chloë Rae Edmonson analyzes performance sites from throughout U.S. history to reveal the material ways that drinking culture is performative, immersive performance is intoxicating, and how alcohol shapes performance space. Combining archival research with first-hand accounts of immersive spaces, this study demonstrates how social drinking and performance in themed spaces often collude to reify power dynamics latent to mainstream American culture, such as patriarchal values, racial and wealth inequality, and labor exploitation. Yet there are also examples of how performers, designers, and consumers creatively subvert such dominant attitudes in pursuit of their own creative expression and fulfilment.Part one examines historic bars and clubs that are immersive by design, while part two explores immersive theatre productions from the 1980s to today. At the heart of all these American examples, of course, is alcohol, its associated cultures of immersive consumption, and the wide range of influence it can have on the bodies and minds of participants. In addition to its pop cultural appeal, this study will be relevant to scholars and university students interested in immersive theatre and performance, drinking culture, and American Studies.
American Accent Drills for British and Australian Speakers
by Amanda QuaidAmerican Accent Drills for British and Australian Speakers provides a comprehensive guide to learning a "General American" accent, made specifically for native English speakers. Unlike most American accent guides, which are geared toward ESL learners, this handbook covers only the shifts that English speakers need to make – nothing more, nothing less. In addition to vowel and consonant drills, it covers the finer points of American intonation and elision, features that often elude English speakers of other dialects. Finally, it provides exercises for "owning" the dialect, finding authenticity and making it work for each individual actor in their own way. This is an excellent resource for students of speech and dialects, actors from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, and advanced ESL learners who need to use an American accent on screen or on stage. American Accent Drills for British and Australian Speakers also includes access to downloadable audio files of the practice drills featured in the book, to help students practice and perfect their American accent.
American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History (Theatre Production Studies)
by Arnold AronsonThis stunning contribution to the field of theatre history is the first in-depth look at avant-garde theatre in the United States from the early 1950s to the 1990s. American Avant-Garde Theatre offers a definition of the avant-garde, and looks at its origins and theoretical foundations by examining: *Gertrude Stein *John Cage *The Beat writers *Avant-garde cinema *Abstract Expressionism *Minimalism There are fascinating discussions and illustrations of the productions of the Living Theatre, the Wooster Group, Open Theatre, Ontological-Hysteric Theatre and Performance Group. among many others. Aronson also examines why avant-garde theatre declined and virtually disappeared at the end of the twentieth century.
The American Clock
by Arthur MillerA bold, vibrant panorama of the Great Depression by "the moral voice of the American stage" (The New York Times) Capturing a cross-section of American life in the throes of the Great Depression, The American Clock presents what Miller called "a mural for theatre," based loosely on Stud's Terkel's oral history, Hard Times. It is the story of a single family, Moe and Rose Baum and their son Lee, who lost everything in the crash of '29. When Lee leaves Brooklyn and travels west in search of work, he comes face to face with the true scope of the Depression's devastation and encounters a tapestry of interlocked stories unfolding across a nation in crisis. In a series of vignettes, a vast ensemble of characters sets the Baums' struggles in relief: a shoeshine man, a corporate tycoon, a dispossessed farmer, a struggling prostitute, a young songwriter, and a communist comic-strip artist, among many disparate American identities. All the while, the clock ticks towards a new era in history, and time is running out for the Baums and the America they know.
American Cultures as Transnational Performance: Commons, Skills, Traces (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Katrin Horn Leopold Lippert Ilka Saal Pia WiegminkThis book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance. Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discussion away from text-centered approaches to intercultural encounters and to bring into focus the dynamic field that opens up between producer, art work, context, setting, and audience in the moment of performance as well as in its afterlife. The chapters provide fresh, performance-based approaches to notions of transcultural mobility and circulation, transnational cultural experience and knowledge formation, transnational public spheres, and identities’ rootedness in both specific local places and diasporic worlds beyond the written word. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of American studies, performance studies, and transnational studies
American Dialects: A Manual for Actors, Directors, and Writers
by Lewis Herman Marguerite Shalett HermanThis standard text, now in paperback for the first time-- the companion volume to Foreign Dialects-- American Dialects offers representative dialects of every major section of the United States. In each case, a general description and history of the dialect is given, followed by an analysis of vowel and consonant peculiarities, of its individual lilt and rhythm, and of its grammar variations. There are also lists of the idioms and idiomatic expressions that distinguish each dialect and exercises using them. American Dialects also includes musical inflection charts and diagrams showing the placement of lips, tongue, and breath.
American Drama of the Twentieth Century (Longman Literature In English Series)
by Gerald M. BerkowitzIn this book Professor Berkowitz studies the diversity of American drama from the stylistic, experimental plays of O'Neill, through verse, tragedy and community theatre, to the theatre of the 1990s. The discussions range through dramatists, plays, genres and themes, with full supporting appendix material. It also examines major dramatists such as Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Sam Shephard, Tennessee Williams and August Wilson and covers not only the Broadway scene but also off Broadway movements and fringe theatres and such subjects as women's and African-American drama.
The American Fiancée: A Novel
by Eric DupontIn this extraordinary breakout novel—a rich, devastatingly humorous epic of one unforgettable family—award-winning author Eric Dupont illuminates the magic of stories, the bonds of family, and the twists of fate and fortune to transform our lives.Over the course of the twentieth century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Their complicated family dynamic—as dramatic as Puccini’s legendary opera, Tosca—will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world . . . until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts. Born on Christmas, Louis Lamontagne, the family’s patriarch, is a larger-than-life lothario and raconteur who inherits his mother’s teal eyes and his father’s brutish good looks and whose charms travel beyond Quebec, across the state of New York where he wins at county fairs as a larger-than-life strongman, and even in Europe, where he is deployed for the US Army during World War II. We meet his daughter, Madeleine, who opens a successful chain of diners using the recipes from her grandmother, the original American Fiancée, and vows never to return to her hometown. And we end with her son Gabriel, another ladies’ man in the family, who falls in love with a woman he follows to Berlin and discovers unexpected connections there to the Lamontagne family that re-frame the entire course of the events in the book.An unholy marriage of John Irving and Gary Shteyngart with the irresistible whimsy of Elizabeth McCracken, The American Fiancée is a big, bold, wildly ambitious novel that introduces a dynamic new voice to contemporary literature.Translated from the French by Peter McCambridge.
American Film: A History
by Jon Lewis<p>Written by a top scholar in the field, American Film: A History gives students a thorough understanding of the fascinating intersection of artistry and economics in Hollywood cinema from the beginning of film history to the present. <p>A beautiful book and a brisk read, American Film is the most enjoyable and interesting overview of the history of American filmmaking available. Focused on aspects of the film business that are of perennial interest to undergraduates, this book will engage students from beginning to end.</p>
An American Health Dilemma: Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States 1900-2000
by W. Michael Byrd Linda A. ClaytonFirst published in 2002. An American Health Dilemma is the story of medicine in the United States from the perspective of people who were consistently, officially mistreated, abused, or neglected by the Western medical tradition and the US health-care system. It is also the compelling story of African Americans fighting to participate fully in the health-care professions in the face of racism and the increased power of health corporations and HMOs. This tour-de-force of research on the relationship between race, medicine, and health care in the United States is an extraordinary achievement by two of the leading lights in the field of public health. Ten years out, it is finally updated, with a new third volume taking the story up to the present and beyond, remaining the premiere and only reference on black public health and the history of African American medicine on the market today. No one who is concerned with American race relations, with access to and quality of health care, or with justice and equality for humankind can afford to miss this powerful resource.
The American Musical: Evolution of an Art Form
by Ben WestThe American Musical is a comprehensive history of an American art form. It delivers a detailed and definitive portrait of the American musical’s artistic evolution over the course of seven distinct, newly defined eras, with a unique perspective gleaned from research at more than twenty different archives across the United States.Individual in both its approach and coverage, The American Musical traces the form’s creative journey from its 19th century beginnings, through its 20th century maturation, and to the turn of the 21st century, shedding new light on a myriad of authors, directors, and craftspeople who worked on Broadway and beyond. This book actively addresses the form’s often overlooked female and African-American artists, provides an in-depth accounting of such outside influences as minstrelsy, vaudeville, nightclubs, and burlesque, and explores the dynamic relationship between the form and the consciousness of its country.The American Musical is a fascinating and insightful read for students, artists, and afficionados of the American musical, and anyone with an interest in this singular form of entertainment.
The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity: And the Performance of Personal Identity
by Raymond KnappThe American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project. This book addresses a variety of specific themes in musicals that serve this general function: fairy tale and fantasy, idealism and inspiration, gender and sexuality, and relationships, among others. It also considers three overlapping genres that are central, in quite different ways, to the projection of personal identity: operetta, movie musicals, and operatic musicals. Among the musicals discussed are Camelot, Candide; Chicago; Company; Evita; Gypsy; Into the Woods; Kiss Me, Kate; A Little Night Music; Man of La Mancha; Meet Me in St. Louis; The Merry Widow; Moulin Rouge; My Fair Lady; Passion; The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Singin' in the Rain; Stormy Weather; Sweeney Todd; and The Wizard of Oz. Complementing the author's earlier work, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, this book completes a two-volume thematic history of the genre, designed for general audiences and specialists alike.
American Playwriting and the Anti-Political Prejudice
by Nelson PressleyTwenty years after Tony Kushner's influential Angels in America seemed to declare a revitalized potency for the popular political play, there is a "No Politics" prejudice undermining US production and writing. This book explores the largely unrecognized cultural patterns that discourage political playwriting on the contemporary American stage.
American Politics in Hollywood Film (Edinburgh University Press)
by Ian ScottHow is the American political landscape represented in cinema? What is the relationship between Hollywood and Washington? From Arnold Schwarzenegger's rise to the Governorship of California through to the drama of the celebrity-fuelled 2008 Presidential election, Hollywood and politics have never been more intimate. This thoroughly updated and revised new edition continues to analyse the theoretical and conceptual relationship of Hollywood to national politics and the way film content and criticism has aligned itself to political culture and debate.Chronicling the evolution of American political cinema from the 1930s, this book explores the genre's symbiotic relationship with the American political culture and history. Through textual analysis of a range of films and television series, Scott provides a critique of current and past developments across several sub-genres, including the bio-pic, the election film and documentary. New for this edition* Analysis of the post-9/11 and Bush era's effect on
American Pop: A Novel
by Snowden WrightAN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR“Mr. Wright’s imagined history of the rise and fall of the sugary drink empire is so robust and recognizable that you might feel nostalgic for the taste of a soda you’ve never had.” – Sam Sacks, TheWall Street JournalNAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY Parade • Cosmopolitan • Town & Country•AARP • InStyle • Garden & Gun • Vol. 1 BrooklynThe story of a family.The story of an empire. The story of a nation.Moving from Mississippi to Paris to New York and back again, a saga of family, ambition, passion, and tragedy that brings to life one unforgettable Southern dynasty—the Forsters, founders of the world’s first major soft-drink company—against the backdrop of more than a century of American cultural history. The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always wanted more—from his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working twelve-hour days at his father’s drugstore; to the moment he first laid eyes on his future wife, Annabelle Teague, a true Southern belle of aristocratic lineage; to his invention of the delicious fizzy drink that would transform him from tiller boy into the founder of an empire, the Panola Cola Company, and entice a youthful, enterprising nation entering a hopeful new age.Now the heads of a preeminent American family spoken about in the same breath as the Hearsts and the Rockefellers, Houghton and Annabelle raise their four children with the expectation they’ll one day become world leaders. The burden of greatness falls early on eldest son Montgomery, a handsome and successful politician who has never recovered from the horrors and heartbreak of the Great War. His younger siblings Ramsey and Lance, known as the “infernal twins,” are rivals not only in wit and beauty, but in their utter carelessness with the lives and hearts of others. Their brother Harold, as gentle and caring as the twins can be cruel, is slowed by a mental disability—and later generations seem equally plagued by misfortune, forcing Houghton to seriously consider who should control the company after he’s gone.An irresistible tour de force of original storytelling, American Pop blends fact and fiction, the mundane and the mythical, and utilizes techniques of historical reportage to capture how, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words, “families are always rising and falling in America,” and to explore the many ways in which nostalgia can manipulate cultural memory—and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.
American Soldier
by Matt MorilloDrama / Characters: 3m, 2f / In American Soldiers, the patriarch of a politically prominent Long Island family fights to hold the family together when his eldest daughter, an Army veteran, returns from the Middle East for an uneasy homecoming. The girl, emotionally scarred from her military service, is struggling to take her ex-boyfriend and sister away with her to start a new life in Colorado. Her aim is to liberate them of the hometown influences of society, religion and class that led her to enlist. The play reveals the urge of children to break away, the power of family destiny and the emotional ties that bind. What is it about Nassau and Suffolk counties that makes them a breeding ground for "good little American soldiers," as Angela Coletti, the returning veteran, says? Her late mother had been a local Assemblywoman and her brother, Carlo Jr., is now running for a congressional seat. They are liberal politicians and "modern" Catholics, chastened by the wars of our time, who would seem to hold the old beliefs at arms' length. But to Angela, they are no more than cogs in a machine of conformity whose morals make no sense and who perpetuate dangerous myths. The force of her rebellion is set against the determination of her father, a Vietnam Veteran who is equally committed to holding the family together. His methods range from the good old fatherly temper tantrum to the kind of heart-to-heart with his soldier-daughter that only veterans can have. Through their tug of war, we witness the real forces that keep many of our young people fighting what Angela calls, "the same fight, generation after generation." It's the power of family and the hold of religion.
American Tales
by Ken Stone4m, 1f / Running Time: 90 minutes plus intermission / Period costumes and set pieces, mid to late 19th century / Act I, The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton, is from Mark Twain's story of two people falling in love at a great distance with the aid of that brand-new invention, the telephone. Alonzo in Maine and Rosannah in California meet by the accident of crossed wires and each falls in love with an imagined ideal of the other. So complete is their self-deception that even when brought face to face they cannot recognize each other. Love is found, lost, and found again. Played as period melodrama, but the relevance to 21st century dating habits is clear. Act II, Bartleby, the Scrivener, is dramatized from Herman Melville's slyly funny but ultimately tragic story. Building on the theme of human connections made and missed, this act takes a darker turn, looking at people who occupy the closest of quarters and yet don't really communicate at all. Bartleby, employed as a copyist in a law office of the 1840s, inexplicably begins to refuse to work, forcing his colleagues to ask themselves the transforming question that ends the play: What do we owe to the people who come into our lives? "Excellent new musical." - Critic's Choice, LA Times
American Television during a Television Presidency (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)
by Michael Mario Albrecht Hannah Andrews Kathryn Castle Steven Cohan K. Scott Culpepper Kwakiutl L. Dreher Jessica Ford Teresa Forde Gregory Frame Oliver Gruner Rafal Kus Aimee Mollaghan Martin Murray Donna Peberdy Karen McNally Dolores Resano Simon Stow Martin Zeller-JacquesIn American Television during a Television Presidency, Karen McNally and contributors critically examine the various ways in which television became transfixed by the Trump presidency and the broader political, social, and cultural climate. This book is the first to fully address the relationship between TV and a presidency consistently conducted with television in mind. The sixteen chapters cover everything from the political theater of televised impeachment hearings to the potent narratives of fictional drama and the stinging critiques of comedy, as they consider the wide-ranging ways in which television engages with the shifting political culture that emerged during this period. Approaching television both historically and in the contemporary moment, the contributors¾an international group of scholars from a variety of academic disciplines¾illuminate the indelible links that exist between television, American politics, and the nation’s broader culture. As it interrogates a presidency played out through the lens of the TV camera and reviews a medium immersing itself in a compelling and inescapable subject, American Television during a Television Presidency sets out to explore what defines the television of the Trump era as a distinctive time in TV history. From inequalities to resistance, and from fandom to historical memory, this book opens up new territory in which to critically analyze television’s complex relationship with Donald Trump, his presidency, and the political culture of this unsettled and simultaneously groundbreaking era. Undergraduate and graduate students and scholars of film and television studies, comedy studies, and cultural studies will value this strong collection.
The American Theatre Reader
by Staff of American Theatre MagazineIn celebration of American Theatre's twenty-fifth anniversary, the editors of the nation's leading theater magazine have chosen their best essays and interviews to provide an intimate look at the people, plays, and events that have shaped the American theater over the past quarter-century. Over two hundred artists, critics, and theater professionals are gathered in this one-of-a-kind collection, from the visionaries who conceived of a diverse and thriving national theater community, to the practitioners who have made that dream a reality. The American Theatre Reader captures their wide-ranging stories in a single compelling volume, essential reading for theater professionals and theatergoers alike.Partial contents include:Interviews with Edward Albee, Anne Bogart, Peter Brook, Lorraine Hansbury, Lillian Hellman, Jonathan Larson, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Joseph Papp, Will Power, Bartlett Scher, Sam Shepard, Tom Stoppard, Luis Valdez, Paula Vogel, August Wilson, and others.Essays by Eric Bentley, Eric Bogosian, Robert Brustein, Christopher Durang, Oskar Eustis, Zelda Fichandler, Eva La Gallienne, Vaclav Havel, Danny Hoch, Tina Howe, David Henry Hwang, Naomi Iizuki, Adrienne Kennedy, Tony Kushner, Kristin Linklater, Todd London, Robert MacNeil, Des McAnuff, Conor McPherson, Marsha Norman, Suzan-Lori Parks, Hal Prince, Phylicia Rashad, Frank Rich, José Rivera, Alan Schneider, Marian Seldes, Wallace Shawn, Anna Deavere Smith, Molly Smith, Diana Son, Wole Soyinka, and many others.
American ‘Unculture’ in French Drama
by Les EssifA book about the role America plays in the French imagination, as it translates to the French stage. Informed by a rich variety of Western cultural scholarship, Essif examines two dozen post-1960 works representing some of the most innovative dramaturgy of the last half century, including works by Gatti, Obaldia, Cixous, Koltes, and Vinaver.
Americans on Shakespeare, 1776-1914 (Routledge Revivals)
by Peter RawlingsPublished in 1999. Shakespeare is ‘the great author of America’ declared James Fenimore Cooper in 1828. The ambiguous resonance of this claim is fully borne out in this collection of writings on Shakespeare by over forty prominent Americans, spanning the period between the War of independence and the outbreak of the First World War. Featured writers include: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. The essays, many of which are reprinted here for the first time, are arranged in chronological order and provide a fascinating conspectus of American attitudes to Shakespeare, from Revolutionary and Transcendentalist approaches through to the influential interventions of professional American critics in the early twentieth century. The extraordinary and bizarre contribution to the Shakespeare debut by Delia Bacon is exemplified by the inclusion of her 1856 article which is reprinted in its entirety. Americans on Shakespeare charts the emergence of an American literary tradition, and the gradual appropriation of Shakespeare as part of the American search for cultural identity; an identity whose domination is set to continue into the twenty-first century.