Spectacle and Sacrifice

Spectacle and Sacrifice
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Total Pages : 418
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781684174881
ISBN-13 : 1684174880
Rating : 4/5 (81 Downloads)

Synopsis Spectacle and Sacrifice by : David Johnson

"This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. Temple festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for religious and artistic creation. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay. Chinese culture was a performance culture, and ritual was the highest form of performance. Village ritual life everywhere in pre-revolutionary China was complex, conservative, and extraordinarily diverse. Festivals and their associated rituals and operas provided the emotional and intellectual materials out of which ordinary people constructed their ideas about the world of men and the realm of the gods. It is, David Johnson argues, impossible to form an adequate idea of traditional Chinese society without a thorough understanding of village ritual. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow him to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China."

Spectacle and Sacrifice

Spectacle and Sacrifice
Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0674033043
ISBN-13 : 9780674033047
Rating : 4/5 (43 Downloads)

Synopsis Spectacle and Sacrifice by : David George Johnson

This book describes the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. The great festivals were their supreme collective achievements, carried out virtually without aid from local officials or educated elites. Newly discovered manuscripts allow Johnson to reconstruct the festivals in unprecedented detail.

Spectacle and Society in Livy's History

Spectacle and Society in Livy's History
Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Total Pages : 267
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780520210271
ISBN-13 : 0520210271
Rating : 4/5 (71 Downloads)

Synopsis Spectacle and Society in Livy's History by : Andrew Feldherr

"An exciting and sophisticated approach to a major author in the Latin canon who has been much ignored. Feldherr's writing is clear and intelligent and admirably reflects his engagement in the material. The close analysis is extraordinarily perceptive and innovative—a real pleasure to read."—Ann Vasaly, author of Representations "[Feldherr] persuasively establishes civic spectacle as a broad category under which to examine the rhetorical strategies of both the makers and the writers of history."—Ralph Hexter, University of California, Berkeley

The Story of Drama

The Story of Drama
Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages : 249
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781408183533
ISBN-13 : 1408183536
Rating : 4/5 (33 Downloads)

Synopsis The Story of Drama by : Gary Day

Tracing the history of tragedy and comedy from their earliest beginnings to the present, this book offers readers an exceptional study of the development of both genres, grounded in analysis of landmark plays and their context. It argues that sacrifice is central to both genres, and demonstrates how it provides a key to understanding the grand sweep of Western drama. For students of literature and drama the volume serves as an accessible companion to over two millennia of drama organised by period, and reveals how sacrifice represents a through-line running from classical drama to today's reality TV and blockbuster movies. Across the chapters devoted to each period, Day explores how the meanings of sacrifice change over time, but never quite disappear. He charts the influences of religion, social change and politics on the status and purposes of theatre in each period, and on the drama itself. But it is through a close study of key plays that he reveals the continuities centred around sacrifice that persist and which illuminate aspects of human psychology and social organisation. Among the many plays and events considered are Aeschylus' trilogy The Oresteia, Aristophanes' Women at the Thesmorphia, Menander's The Bad-Tempered Man, the spectacles of the Roman Games, Seneca's The Trojan Women, Plautus's The Rope, the Cycle plays and Everyman from the Middle Ages, Shakespeare's King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, Thomas Otway's The Orphan, William Wycherley's The Country Wife, Wilde's A Woman of No Importance, Beckett' Waiting for Godot, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, Sarah Kane's Blasted and Charlotte Jones' Humble Boy. A conclusion examines the persistence of ideas of sacrifice in today's reality TV and blockbuster movies.

NASCAR, Sturgis, and the New Economy of Spectacle

NASCAR, Sturgis, and the New Economy of Spectacle
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Total Pages : 239
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789004300613
ISBN-13 : 9004300619
Rating : 4/5 (13 Downloads)

Synopsis NASCAR, Sturgis, and the New Economy of Spectacle by : Daniel Krier

NASCAR, Sturgis, and the New Economy of Spectacle maps the structure of economies of spectacle in stock car racing and large displacement motorcycle rallying. The book traces the historical development of economic spectacles and models the structural components and moving parts that sustain them. Economies of spectatorship emerge when activities and legends in the cultural commons are privatized or enclosed as immaterial property. Once privatized, a spectacular diegesis supports a triple-circuit of profit: spectatorship markets (payments to see), sponsorship markets (payments to be seen) and trophy markets (payments to be seen enjoying). Vivid illustrations of legendary action in NASCAR and carnivalesque displays at Sturgis reveal how spectator events function as intensive sites of profit-making in contemporary capitalism.

Diversity of Sacrifice

Diversity of Sacrifice
Author :
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Total Pages : 292
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781438459967
ISBN-13 : 1438459963
Rating : 4/5 (67 Downloads)

Synopsis Diversity of Sacrifice by : Carrie Ann Murray

The term "sacrifice" belies what is a complex and varied transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon. Bringing together scholars from such diverse fields as anthropology, archaeology, epigraphy, literature, and theology, Diversity of Sacrifice explores sacrificial practices across a range of contexts from prehistory to the present. Incorporating theory, material culture, and textual evidence, the volume seeks to consider new and divergent data related to contexts of sacrifice that can help broaden our field of vision while raising new questions. The essays contributed here move beyond reductive and simple explanations to explore complex areas of social interaction. Sacrifice plays a key role in the overlapping sacred and secular spheres for a number of societies in the past and present. How religious beliefs and practices can be integral parts of life on individual and community levels is of fundamental importance to understanding the past and present. In addition to aiding scholarly research, Diversity of Sacrifice enables students to explore this rich theme across Europe and the Mediterranean with clear discussions of theory and data.

Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature

Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages : 248
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780199272075
ISBN-13 : 0199272077
Rating : 4/5 (75 Downloads)

Synopsis Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature by : Simon Gaunt

Examines the association of love and death in medieval French and Occitan courtly literature using an approach informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Jacques Derrida. Offers new readings of canonical authors and texts, including Bernart de Ventadorn, Jaufre Rudel, Chrétien de Troyes, Thomas's Tristan, the Prose Lancelot, the Tristan en prose, La Mort le roi Artu, Marie de France, Le Chastelaine de Vergy, Le Castelain deCouci, and Le Roman de la Rose.

Cinema and Sacrifice

Cinema and Sacrifice
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 177
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781317385677
ISBN-13 : 1317385675
Rating : 4/5 (77 Downloads)

Synopsis Cinema and Sacrifice by : Costica Bradatan

Cinema has a long history of engaging with the theme of sacrifice. Given its capacity to stimulate the imagination and resonate across a wide spectrum of human experiences, sacrifice has always attracted filmmakers. It is on screen that the new grand narratives are sketched, the new myths rehearsed, and the old ones recycled. Sacrifice can provide stories of loss and mourning, betrayal and redemption, death and renewal, destruction and re-creation, apocalypses and the birth of new worlds. The contributors to this volume are not just scholars of film but also students of religion and literature, philosophers, ethicists, and political scientists, thus offering a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between cinema and sacrifice. They explore how cinema engages with sacrifice in its many forms and under different guises, and examine how the filmic constructions, reconstructions and misconstructions of sacrifice affect society, including its sacrificial practices. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities.

War, Spectacle, and Politics in the Ancient Andes

War, Spectacle, and Politics in the Ancient Andes
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 307
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781009041294
ISBN-13 : 1009041290
Rating : 4/5 (94 Downloads)

Synopsis War, Spectacle, and Politics in the Ancient Andes by : Elizabeth N. Arkush

Warfare in the pre-Columbian Andes took on many forms, from inter-village raids to campaigns of conquest. Andean societies also created spectacular performances and artwork alluding to war – acts of symbolism that worked as political rhetoric while drawing on ancient beliefs about supernatural beings, warriors, and the dead. In this book, Elizabeth Arkush disentangles Andean warfare from Andean war-related spectacle and offers insights into how both evolved over time. Synthesizing the rich archaeological record of fortifications, skeletal injury, and material evidence, she presents fresh visions of war and politics among the Moche, Chimú, Inca, and pre-Inca societies of the conflict-ridden Andean highlands. The changing configurations of Andean power and violence serve as case studies to illustrate a sophisticated general model of the different forms of warfare in pre-modern societies. Arkush's book makes the complex pre-history of Andean warfare accessible by providing a birds-eye view of its major patterns and contrasts.

A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity

A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity
Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages : 692
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781444339529
ISBN-13 : 1444339524
Rating : 4/5 (29 Downloads)

Synopsis A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity by : Paul Christesen

A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity presents a series of essays that apply a socio-historical perspective to myriad aspects of ancient sport and spectacle. Covers the Bronze Age to the Byzantine Empire Includes contributions from a range of international scholars with various Classical antiquity specialties Goes beyond the usual concentrations on Olympia and Rome to examine sport in cities and territories throughout the Mediterranean basin Features a variety of illustrations, maps, end-of-chapter references, internal cross-referencing, and a detailed index to increase accessibility and assist researchers