Voice in Motionexplores the human voice as a literary, historical, and performative motif in early modern English drama and culture, where the voice was frequently represented as struggling, even ...failing, to work. In a compelling and original argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of the voice's materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern theater underscored the voice's volatility through the use of pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable to malfunction. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and their contemporaries alongside a wide range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts-including anatomy books, acoustic science treatises, Protestant sermons, music manuals, and even translations of Ovid-Bloom maintains that cultural representations and theatrical enactments of the voice as "unruly matter" undermined early modern hierarchies of gender. The uncontrollable physical voice creates anxiety for men, whose masculinity is contingent on their capacity to discipline their voices and the voices of their subordinates. By contrast, for women the voice is most effective not when it is owned and mastered but when it is relinquished to the environment beyond. There, the voice's fragile material form assumes its full destabilizing potential and becomes a surprising source of female power. Indeed, Bloom goes further to query the boundary between the production and reception of vocal sound, suggesting provocatively that it is through active listening, not just speaking, that women on and off the stage reshape their world. Bringing together performance theory, theater history, theories of embodiment, and sound studies, this book makes a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist theory by challenging traditional conceptions of the links among voice, body, and self.
This volume explores how the choruses of Greek tragedy creatively combined media and discourses to generate their own specific forms of meaning. The contributors analyse choruses as fictional, ...religious and civic performers; as combinations of text, song and dance; and as objects of reflection in themselves, in relation and contrast to the choruses of comedy and melic poetry. Drawing on earlier analyses of the social context of Greek drama, the non-textual dimensions of tragedy, and the relations between dramatic and melic choruses, the chapters explore the uses of various analytic tools in allowing us better to capture the specificity of the tragic chorus. Special attention is given to the physicality of choral dancing, musical interactions between choruses and actors, the trajectories of reception, and the treatment of time and space in the odes.
This highly original book brings compelling narratives of migration and social diversity vividly to life. At once a play script and an outcome of ethnographic research, this book is a rich resource ...for the interpretation and representation of life in the multilingual city.
A play about self-worth, mental health and self harm. This play, for year 8+ has been developed in consultation with clinicians, those who have recovered from self-harm and leading charities in the ...field.
The extraordinary global success of Turkish drama serials is a significant development in contemporary popular culture. This book presents comparative audience data from three different regions to ...explore its ramifications across the Global South. We learn how this phenomenon has transformed Turkey—a Muslim-majority country—into the world’s second-largest producer of scripted television serials, enticing audiences from all over the world. The book takes an audience-centred approach, investigating the reasons for the allure of Turkish dramas to Arab, Latin American, and Israeli audiences. In tandem, it explores Turkey's changing foreign policy, economic, and trade relationships since the turn of the millennium, which have coincided with the enormous success of the country's television output. It also analyses the role and importance of Turkish dramas as a soft-power tool by scrutinizing how they have influenced viewers' perceptions of Turkey, its people, and its culture. This volume will appeal to those working in various disciplines—from media and communication, international relations, public diplomacy, sociology, and Middle Eastern studies. The material will also be of great relevance to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduate students, academics, scholars and researchers.
Hamlet’s Arab journey Litvin, Margaret; Litvin, Margaret
2011., 20111003, 2011, 2012-01-01, Letnik:
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eBook
For the past five decades, Arab intellectuals have seen themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet: their times "out of joint," their political hopes frustrated by a corrupt older generation. Hamlet's Arab ...Journey traces the uses of Hamlet in Arabic theatre and political rhetoric, and asks how Shakespeare's play developed into a musical with a happy ending in 1901 and grew to become the most obsessively quoted literary work in Arab politics today. Explaining the Arab Hamlet tradition, Margaret Litvin also illuminates the "to be or not to be" politics that have turned Shakespeare's tragedy into the essential Arab political text, cited by Arab liberals, nationalists, and Islamists alike.
As a serious drama set in an ordinary middle-class home, Ibsen's A Doll's House established a new politics of the interior that was to have a lasting impact upon twentieth-century drama. In this ...innovative study, Nicholas Grene traces the changing forms of the home on the stage through nine of the greatest of modern plays and playwrights. From Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard through to Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, domestic spaces and personal crises have been employed to express wider social conditions and themes of class, gender and family. In the later twentieth century and beyond, the most radically experimental dramatists created their own challenging theatrical interiors, including Beckett in Endgame, Pinter in The Homecoming and Parks in Topdog/Underdog. Grene analyses the full significance of these versions of domestic spaces to offer fresh insights into the portrayal of the naturalistic environment in modern drama.
The topical nature of the subject justifies its relevance. The analysis, based on field observations, is inspired by the approaches that underlie social criticism. It reveals, in the beginning, a ...disinterest in the pandemic, concern left to anonymous and improvised actors producing a “drama of misunderstanding” trivializing the plague. Then came an awakening of professionals in drama, which the sociocritical analysis of the Ivorian case explains by the difficulties encountered by the politicians. Indeed, the speed and firmness of the decisions, contrasting with their application, selective, soft or absent, give matter to a dramatic production. Drama is involved in raising public awareness through filmed productions. This analysis proposes solutions for efficient handling of the pandemic through Drama. They advocate the massive realization of works couraging anti-covid vaccination and barrier measures, through the theme, the attitude of actors and spectators.
Mario Erasmo draws on all the available evidence to trace the evolution of Roman tragedy from the earliest tragedians to the dramatist Seneca and to explore the role played by Roman culture in ...shaping the perception of theatricality on and off the stage.
Drawing upon recent scholarship in Renaissance studies regarding notions of the body, political, physical and social, this study examines how the satiric tragedians of the English Renaissance employ ...the languages of sex - including sexual slander, titillation, insinuation and obscenity - in the service of satiric aggression. There is a close association between the genre of satire and sexually descriptive language in the period, author Gabriel Rieger argues, particularly in the ways in which both the genre and the languages embody systems of oppositions. In exploring the various purposes which sexually descriptive language serves for the satiric tragedian, Rieger reviews a broad range of texts, ancient, Renaissance, and contemporary, by satiric tragedians, moralists, medical writers and critics, paying particular attention to the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and John Webster
Contents: Introduction: sex, stoicism and satyre: the roots of satiric tragedy; 'You go not till I set you up a glass': the death of Elizabeth and the languages of gender; 'Deep ruts and fouls sloughs': sexually descriptive language and the narrative of disease; 'I'll have my will': frustrated desire and commercial culture; 'I am worth no worse a place': service, subjugation and satire; Conclusion: erotic aggression and satiric tragedy; Appendix; Works cited, Index.
Gabriel A. Rieger is an assistant professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Concord University in Athens, West Virginia, where he lives with his wife and daughter
