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To what extent do operas express the political and cultural ideas of their age? How do they reflect the composer's view of the changing relations among art, politics, and society? In this book John Bokina focuses on political aspects and meanings of operas from the baroque to postmodern period, showing the varied ways that operas become sensuous vehicles for the articulation of political ideas. Bokina begins with an analysis of Monteverdi's three extant operas, which address in an oblique way the political and ideological dualities of aristocratic rule in the seventeenth-century Italy. He then moves to Mozart's "Don Giovanni", which he views as a celebration of the demise of a predatory aris...
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was a member of the Frankfurt School, a leading figure of 1960s counterculture, and a fundamental character for the New Left. His ideas and theories, inspired by a rich fusion of Marxian and Freudian thought, exert a strong influence on contemporary thinking about activism, emancipation, and political resistance. He was also a student of Martin Heidegger in the late 1920s and engaged deeply with philosophy throughout his career. The Marcusean Mind is an outstanding survey and assessment of Marcuse's thought. Beginning with a thorough introduction to Marcuse's life and work, 39 chapters by an international and interdisciplinary team of contributors are organized ...
This text is both an historical look at activism on campus since the 1960s and an exploration of the ways in which the historian's craft leads to social change. The authors defend political dissent and document the importance of activism and public debate on college campuses.
In the 1960s and 70s, a new youth consciousness emerged in Western Europe which gave this period its distinct character. This volume demonstrates how international developments fused with national traditions, producing specific youth cultures that became leading trendsetters of emergent post-industrial Western societies.
Weaving personal narrative with a synthesis of feminist mothering theory and psychoanalytic theories of narcissism, Isaac D. Balbus describes his effort to share in the care of his daughter during her first four years.
This book is both a telling of operatic histories 'after' Richard Wagner, and a philosophical reflection upon the writing of those histories. Historical musicology reckons with intellectual and cultural history, and vice versa. The 'after' of the title denotes chronology, but also harmony and antagonism within a Wagnerian tradition. Parsifal, in which Wagner attempted to go beyond his achievement in the Ring, to write 'after' himself, is followed by two apparent antipodes: the strenuously modernist Arnold Schoenberg and the stheticist Richard Strauss. Discussion of Strauss's Capriccio, partly in the light of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, reveals a more 'political' work than either first acqua...
Politics as Radical Creation examines the meaning of democratic practice through the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School. It provides an understanding of democratic politics as a potentially performative good-in-itself, undertaken not just to the extent that it seeks to achieve a certain extrinsic goal, but also in that it functions as a medium for the expression of creative human impulses. Christopher Holman develops this potential model through a critical examination of the political philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. Holman argues that, while Arendt and Marcuse's respective theorizations each ultimately restrict the potential scope of creative human expression, their juxtaposition which has not been previously explored results in a more comprehensive theory of democratic existence, one that is uniquely able to affirm the creative capacities of the human being. Yielding important theoretical results that will interest scholars of each theorist and of theories of democracy more generally, Politics as Radical Creation provides a valuable means for rethinking the nature of contemporary democratic practice.
Ordinary. Banal. Quotidian. These words are rarely used to praise architecture, but in fact they represent the interest of a growing number of architects looking to the everyday to escape the ever-quickening cycles of consumption and fashion that have reduced architecture to a series of stylistic fads. Architecture of the Everyday makes a plea for an architecture that is emphatically un-monumental, anti-heroic, and unconcerned with formal extravagance. Edited by Deborah Berke and Steven Harris, this collection of writings, photo-essays, and projects describes an architecture that draws strength from its simplicity, use of common materials, and relationship to other fields of study. Topics ra...
With Denaturalizing Ecological Politics, Andrew Biro has found a way of rescuing environmentalism from the ideological trap of naturalism.
The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain examines the involvement of Italian opera in British partisan politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, which saw Sir Robert Walpole's rise to power and George Frideric Handel's greatest period of opera production. McGeary argues that the conventional way of applying Italian opera to contemporary political events and persons by means of allegory and allusion in individual operas is mistaken; nor did partisan politics intrude into the management of the Royal Academy of Music and the Opera of the Nobility. This book shows instead how Senesino, Faustina, Cuzzoni and events at the Haymarket Theatre were used in political allegories in satirical essays directed against the Walpole ministry. Since most operas were based on ancient historical events, the librettos - like traditional histories - could be sources of examples of vice, virtue, and political precepts and wisdom that could be applied to contemporary politics.