Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Playwrights in Rehearsal
Playwrights in Rehearsal is an inside look at the writer's role in the creative process of bringing his or her words to life on stage. Susan Letzler Cole, granted rare access to some of the major playwrights of our time, recounts her participation in rehearsal with Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner and Suzan-Lori Parks, and others.
Serious Daring
Serious Daring is the story of the complementary journeys of two American women artists, celebrated fiction writer Eudora Welty and internationally acclaimed photographer Rosamond Purcell, each of whom initially practiced, but then turned from, the art form ultimately pursued by the other. For both Welty and Purcell, the art realized is full of the art seemingly abandoned. Welty’s short stories and novels use images of photographs, photographers, and photography. Purcell photographed books, texts, and writing. Both women make compelling art out of the seeming tension between literary and visual cultures. Purcell wrote a memoir in which photographs became endnotes. Welty re-emerged as a photographer through the publication of four volumes of what she called her “snapshots,” magnificent black-and-white photographs of small-town Mississippi and New York City life. Serious Daring is a fascinating look at how the road not taken can stubbornly accompany the chosen path, how what is seemingly left behind can become a haunting and vital presence in life and art.
The Absent One
Here is presented a new theory of the origins of tragedy, based on its perceived kinship with mourning ritual. Mourners and tragic protagonists alike journey through dangerous transitional states, confront the uncanny, express themselves in antithetical style, and, above all, enact their ambivalence toward their beloved dead. Elements common to both tragedy and mourning ritual are first identified in actual Chinese, African, and Greek funerary rites and then analyzed in tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen, O'Neill, Miller, Beckett, and Ionesco. Included is a firsthand account of exploration of the tragedy-mourning link in the rehearsal process of the great experimental theater director, Joseph Chaikin. Opening her first chapter, Dr. Cole says, "The grave is the birthplace of tragic drama and ghosts are its procreators. For tragedy is the performance of ambivalence which ghosts emblematize: what we fear in particular--the revenant, the ghost returning to haunt us--is also what we desire--the extending of life beyond the moment of death."
The Director and Directing
This book critically assesses the artistry of contemporary directors. Its discussion includes the work of Declan Donnellan, Thomas Ostermeier, Deborah Warner, Simon Stone and Krzysztof Warlikowski. Alongside the work of wider theorists (Patrice Pavis and Erika Fischer-Lichte), it uses neuroaesthetic theory (Semir Zeki) and cognitive and creative process models to offer an original means to discuss the performance event, emotion, brain structures and concepts, and the actor’s body in performance. It offers first-hand observation of rehearsals led by Katie Mitchell, Ivo van Hove, Carrie Cracknell and the Steppenwolf Theatre. It also explores devising in relation to the work of Simon McBurney and contemporary groups, and scenography in relation to the work of Dmitry Krymov, Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage. The Director and Directing argues that the director creates a type of knowledge, ‘reward’ and ‘resonant experience’ (G. Gabrielle Starr) through instinctive and expert choices.
Missing Alice
Author Susan Letzler Cole lost her mother, Alice, to colon cancer in 1990. Alice was 78. In this extraordinary journal, Cole explores the ties that bind mothers and daughters: in life, facing death, and during bereavement. The author aptly calls her work “an experimental memoir, the autobiography of two voices.” Here dialogues with her mother, live and late, are spoken in different voices, styles and media, and at divers moments in time. Correspondence and conversation, real and imagined, allow Cole to defy boundaries between child and parent, and the living and the dead. Shunning linear narrative, she favors four literary vantage points: Letters written to her mother three years after A...
The Death of Character
"Extremely well written, and exceedingly well informed, this is a work that opens a variety of important questions in sophisticated and theoretically nuanced ways. It is hard to imagine a better tour guide than Fuchs for a trip through the last thirty years of, as she puts it, what we used to call the 'avant-garde.'" —Essays in Theatre ". . . an insightful set of theoretical 'takes' on how to think about theatre before and theatre after modernism." —Theatre Journal "In short, for those who never experienced a 'postmodern swoon,' Elinor Fuchs is an excellent informant." —Performing Arts Journal ". . . a thoughtful, highly readable contribution to the evolving literature on theatre and p...
Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama
Grieving women in early modern English drama, this study argues, recall not only those of Classical tragedy, but also, and more significantly, the lamenting women of medieval English drama, especially the Virgin Mary. Looking at the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster, this book presents a new perspective on early modern drama grounded upon three original interrelated points. First, it explores how the motif of the mourning woman on the early modern stage embodies the cultural trauma of the Reformation in England. Second, the author here brings to light the extent to which the figures of early modern drama recall those of the recent medieval past. Finally, Goodland addresses how these representations embody actual mourning practices that were viewed as increasingly disturbing after the Reformation. Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama synthesizes and is relevant to several areas of recent scholarly interest, including the performance of gender, the history of emotion, studies of death and mourning, and the cultural trauma of the Reformation.
Myth and the Limits of Reason
Traditionally understood as pre-critical, even pre-rational, mythical thought has in fact played a critical role in post-Enlightenment intellectual history. Modernists in philosophy and literature have used the depictive rationality of myth to disclose, in self-reflective ways, the limits of discursive sense-making in various domains of human experience. In so doing, they have effectively furthered, without resort to analytical abstractions, the epistemological critique of reason begun during the Enlightenment. Stambovsky illustrates four widely diverse examples of this critical form of mythical thinking in works by Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Henry James, and Margaret Atwood. The select...
Philosophical Conceptualization and Literary Art
"In sum, this original inquiry uniquely respects the cognitional diversity that distinguishes the revelatory poetic spirit from the discursively speculative spirit, even as it demonstrates their deep affinities and mutual implications in the life of the imaginative intelligence."--BOOK JACKET.
Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency
Building on current scholarly interest in the religious dimensions of the play, this study shows how Shakespeare uses Hamlet to comment on the Calvinistic Protestantism predominant around 1600. By considering the play's inner workings against the religious ideas of its time, John Curran explores how Shakespeare portrays in this work a completely deterministic universe in the Calvinist mode, and, Curran argues, exposes the disturbing aspects of Calvinism. By rendering a Catholic Prince Hamlet caught in a Protestant world which consistently denies him his aspirations for a noble life, Shakespeare is able in this play, his most theologically engaged, to delineate the differences between the two belief systems, but also to demonstrate the consequences of replacing the old religion so completely with the new.
