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Presenting for the first time Akim Volynsky's (1861-1926) pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering journey to become Russia's foremost ballet critic. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical dance, George Balanchine. With an undeniable proclivity toward ballet's female component, Volynsky's dance writings, illuminated by examples of his earlier gendered criticism, invite speculation on how truly ground-breaking and forward-looking this critic is.
Demonstrates the major impact that Jewish artists and issues related to the Jewish experience have had on the evolution of dance, Presents the most up-to-date overview of the history of the field of Jewish dance studies currently in publication, Offers first-person insights into historically underrepresented experiences of Jewish dance artists, for example from Yemenite and Ethiopian heritages Book jacket.
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Fakhr al-Din al- Razi (1148 - 1210) wrote prolifically in the disciplines of theology, Quranic exegesis, and philosophy; composing treatises on jurisprudence, medicine, physiognomy, astronomy, and astrology. His body of work marks a momentous turning point in the Islamic tradition and his influence is striking within the post-classical Islamic tradition. Razi investigates his transformative contributions to the Islamic intellectual tradition.
Jews and Latinos have been unlikely partners through tumultuous times. This groundbreaking, eclectic book of readings, edited by Ilan Stavans, whom The Washington Post described as "one of our foremost cultural critics," offers a sideboard of the ups and downs of that partnership. It includes some seventy canonical authors, Jews and non-Jews alike, through whose diverse oeuvre-poetry, fiction, theater, personal and philosophical essays, correspondence, historical documents, and even kitchen recipes-the reader is able to navigate the shifting waters of history, from Spain in the tenth century to the Spanish-speaking Americas and the United States today. The Reader showcases the writings of such notable authors as Solomon ibn Gabirol, Maimonides, Miguel de Cervantes, Henry W. Longfellow, Miguel de Unamuno, Federico García Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Jacobo Timerman, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ruth Behar, and Ariel Dorfman to name only a few.
Belle époque Paris adored dance. Whether at the music hall or in more refined theaters, audiences flocked to see the spectacles offered to them by the likes of Isadora Duncan, Diaghilev’s flashy company, and an embarrassment of Salomés. After languishing in the shadow of opera for much of the nineteenth century, ballet found itself part of this lively kinetic constellation. In Kinetic Cultures, Rachana Vajjhala argues that far from being mere delectation, ballet was implicated in the larger republican project of national rehabilitation through a rehabilitation of its citizens. By tracing the various gestural complexes of the period—bodybuilding routines, appropriate physical comportment for women, choreographic vocabularies, and more–-Vajjhala presents a new way of understanding histories of dance and music, one that she locates in gesture and movement.
Viacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949), the central intellectual force in Russian modernism, achieved through his work an original synthesis of Christianity, Platonism, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His powerful intellect exerted an immeasurable influence in modernist Russia and the early Soviet Union, and after emigrating to Italy in 1924 he played an important role in intellectual debates in Western Europe between the wars. In recent years, Ivanov's manifold contributions have been recognized in all major aspects of Russian culture, including poetry, literary theory, philosophy, and theology. In The Russian Prospero, Robert Bird uncovers the foundations of Ivanov's poetic and theoret...
"The scholarship exhibited here is not only superior; it is in many ways staggering. The author's control of an astonishing range of primary and secondary texts from many languages, eras, and disciplines is awe-inspiring. This is a learned, original, and important work."—Robert Goldman, Sanskrit and India Studies, University of California, Berkeley
This monograph is nothing less than a bold attempt at solving the riddle of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls that even inspired a staging of Dead Souls at Schauspiel Stuttgart. Heftrich gives a comprehensive, coherent answer to the question of the novel’s meaning by meticulously laying bare its structure. The first part of the monograph is dedicated to one section of Gogol’s novel that has been neglected by virtually all critics - a clue that leads to a strictly ethical reading of Gogol’s epic. Gogol, as it emerges, constructed Dead Souls strictly according to a moral pattern. It is amazing to discover how flawlessly Dead Souls is built in this regard. The novel thus proves to be a true descendant of medieval romance with its inseparable interrelation between ethics and epics.