Modernist Mysteries Persephone

Author : Tamara Levitz
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199730164
Total Pages : 688 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modernist Mysteries: Persephone written by Tamara Levitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, Levitz demonstrates how a group of collaboratoring artists - Igor Stravinsky, Ida Rubenstein, Jacques Copeau, André Gide and others - used the myth of Perséphone to perform and articulate their most deeply held beliefs about four topics significant to modernism: religion, sexuality, death, and historical memory in art.

Author : Tamara Levitz
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199875626
Total Pages : 680 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modernist Mysteries: Persephone written by Tamara Levitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernist Mysteries: Pers?phone is a landmark study that will move the field of musicology in important new directions. The book presents a microhistorical analysis of the premiere of the melodrama Pers?phone at the Paris Opera on April 30th, 1934, engaging with the collaborative, transnational nature of the production. Author Tamara Levitz demonstrates how these collaborators-- Igor Stravinsky, Andr? Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Ida Rubinstein, among others-used the myth of Persephone to perform and articulate their most deeply held beliefs about four topics significant to modernism: religion, sexuality, death, and historical memory in art. In investigating the aesthetic and political consequences of the artists' diverging perspectives, and the fall-out of their titanic clash on the theater stage, Levitz dismantles myths about neoclassicism as a musical style. The result is a revisionary account of modernism in music in the 1930s. As a result of its focus on the collaborative performance, this book differs from traditional accounts of musical modernism and neoclassicism in several ways. First and foremost, it centers on the performance of modernism, highlighting the theatrical, performative, and sensual. Levitz places Christianity in the center of the discussion, and questions the national distinctions common in modernist research by involving a transnational team of collaborators. She further breaks new ground in shifting the focus from "history" to "memory" by emphasizing the commemorative nature of neoclassic listening rituals over the historicist stylization of its scores, and contends that modernists captured on stage and in philosophical argument their simultaneous need and inability to mourn the past. The book as a whole counters the common criticism that neoclassicism was a "reactionary" musical style by suggesting a more pluralistic, ambivalent, and sometimes even progressive politics, and reconnects musical neoclassicism with a queer classicist tradition extending from Winckelmann through Walter Pater to Gide. Modernist Mysteries concludes that 1930s modernists understood neoclassicism not as formalist compositional approaches but rather as a vitalist art haunted by ghosts of the past and promissory visions of the future.

Author : Margot K. Louis
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351912011
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Persephone Rises, 1860–1927 written by Margot K. Louis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the nineteenth century, the figure of Persephone rapidly evolved from what was essentially a decorative metaphor into a living goddess who embodied the most spiritual aspects of ancient Greek religion. In the first comprehensive survey of the Persephone myth in English and American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Margot Louis explores the transformation of the goddess to provide not only a basis for understanding how the study of ancient history informed the creation of a new spirituality but for comprehending the deep and bitter tensions surrounding gender that interacted with this process. Beginning with an overview of the most influential ancient texts on Persephone and references to Persephone in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Romantic period writing, Louis shows that the earliest theories of matriarchy and patriarchal marriage emerged in the 1860s alongside the first English poems to explore Persephone's story. As scholars began to focus on the chthonic Mystery cults, and particularly on the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, poets and novelists explored the divisions between mother and daughter occasioned by patriarchal marriage. Issues of fertility and ritual resonate in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Willa Cather's My Antonia, while the first advance of a neo-pagan spirituality, as well as early feminist critiques of male mythography and of the Persephone myth, emerge in Modernist poems and fictions from 1908 to 1927. Informed by the latest research and theoretical work on myth, Margot Louis's fascinating study shows the development of Victorian mythography in a new light; offers original takes on Victorian representations of gender and values; exposes how differently male and female Modernists dealt with issues of myth, ritual, and ancient spirituality; and uncovers how deeply the study of ancient spirituality is entwined with controversies about gender.

Author : Michael B. Cosmopoulos
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316368238
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bronze Age Eleusis and the Origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries written by Michael B. Cosmopoulos and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than one thousand years, people from every corner of the Greco-Roman world sought the hope for a blessed afterlife through initiation into the Mysteries of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis. In antiquity itself and in our memory of antiquity, the Eleusinian Mysteries stand out as the oldest and most venerable mystery cult. Despite the tremendous popularity of the Eleusinian Mysteries, their origins are unknown. Because they are lost in an era without written records, they can only be reconstructed with the help of archaeology. This book provides a much-needed synthesis of the archaeology of Eleusis during the Bronze Age and reconstructs the formation and early development of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The discussion of the origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries is complemented with discussions of the theology of Demeter and an update on the state of research in the archaeology of Eleusis from the Bronze Age to the end of antiquity.

Author : Laura Monrós-Gaspar
Publisher : Universitat de València
ISBN 13 : 8491342613
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Re-Thinking Literary Identities written by Laura Monrós-Gaspar and published by Universitat de València. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great Britain is changing, and so is Europe. The aim of this book, therefore, is to reflect upon the processes of (re)creation of art and literature within and against the backdrop of the shifting paradigms of the world as we know it. At a time when the political relations between Great Britain, Europe and the rest of the world are being redefined, this book examines the (de)construction of modern identities through the (de)codification of classical and contemporary mythologies.

Author : Reed Stirling
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780228608370
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shades of Persephone written by Reed Stirling and published by . This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Shades of Persephone is a literary mystery that will entertain those who delight in exotic settings, foreign intrigue, and the unmasking of mysterious characters. Crete in 1980-81, more specifically the old Venetian harbour of Chania, provides the background against which expat Canadian Steven Spire labours in pursuit of David Montgomery, his enigmatic and elusive mentor, who stands accused in absentia of treachery and betrayal. The plot has many seams through which characters slide, another of them being the poet Emma Leigh, widow of Montgomery's imposing Cold War adversary, Heinrich Trüger. In that the setting is Crete, the source of light is manifold, but significant inspiration for Steven Spire comes from Magalee De Bellefeuille, his vision of Aphrodite and his muse. "Find Persephone," she directs him, "and you'll find David Montgomery." Her prompts motivate much of the narrative, including that of the Cretan underground during the Nazi occupation, 1941- 45. Shades of Persephone presents a story of love and sensuality, deception and war, spiritual quest and creative endeavour. The resolution takes an unanticipated turn but comes as no surprise to the discerning reader. Like Hamlet who must deal with his own character in following the injunctions of his ghostly father, Steven Spire discovers much about the city to which he has returned, but much more about himself and his capacity for love."

Author : Ryan Dohoney
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190948590
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Saving Abstraction written by Ryan Dohoney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-25 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saving Abstraction: Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel tells the story of the 1972 premier of Morton Feldman's music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Built in 1971 for "people of all faiths or none," the chapel houses 14 monumental paintings by famed abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, who had committed suicide only one year earlier. Upon its opening, visitors' responses to the chapel ranged from spiritual succor to abject tragedy--the latter being closest to Rothko's intentions. However the chapel's founders--art collectors and philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil--opened the space to provide an ecumenically and spiritually affirming environment that spoke to their avant-garde approach to Catholicism. A year after the chapel opened, Morton Feldman's musical work Rothko Chapel proved essential to correcting the unintentionally grave atmosphere of the de Menil's chapel, translating Rothko's existential dread into sacred ecumenism for visitors. Author Ryan Dohoney reconstructs the network of artists, musicians, and patrons who collaborated on the premier of Feldman's music for the space, and documents the ways collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of art and its potential translation into religious feeling. Rather than frame the debate as a conflict of art versus religion, Dohoney argues that the popular claim of modernism's autonomy from religion has been overstated and that the two have been continually intertwined in an agonistic tension that animates many 20th-century artistic collaborations.

Author : Anderson Araujo
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1942954395
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Companion to Ezra Pound's Guide to Kulchur written by Anderson Araujo and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Araujo masterfully guides readers through one of Pound's most densely allusive texts, demonstrating its centrality to his poetic theory and practice.

Author : Graham Griffiths
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108386660
Total Pages : 613 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stravinsky in Context written by Graham Griffiths and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stravinsky in Context offers an alternative to chronological biography. Thirty-five short, specially commissioned essays explore the eventful life-tapestry from which Stravinsky's compositions emerged. The opening chapters draw on new research into the composer's childhood in St. Petersburg. Stravinsky's early, often traumatic upbringing is examined in depth, particularly in the context of his brother Roman's death, and religious sensibilities within the family. Further essays consider Stravinsky's years in exile at the centre of dynamic and ever-evolving cultural environments, the composer constantly refining his idiom and re-defining his aesthetics against a backdrop of world events and personal tragedy. The closing chapters review new material regarding Stravinsky's complicated relationship with the Soviet Union, whilst also anticipating his legacy from the varied perspectives of publishing, research and even - in the iconic example of The Rite of Spring - space exploration. The book includes previously unpublished images of the composer and his family.

Author : Helen Thomas
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1315306530
Total Pages : 741 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies written by Helen Thomas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-30 with total page 741 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies maps out the key features of dance studies as the field stands today, while pointing to potential future developments. It locates these features both historically—within dance in particular social and cultural contexts—and in relation to other academic influences that have impinged on dance studies as a discipline. The editors use a thematically based approach that emphasizes that dance scholarship does not stand alone as a single entity, but is inevitably linked to other related fields, debates, and concerns. Authors from across continents have contributed chapters based on theoretical, methodological, ethnographic, and practice-based case studies, bringing together a wealth of expertise and insight to offer a study that is in-depth and wide-ranging. Ideal for scholars and upper-level students of dance and performance studies, The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies challenges the reader to expand their knowledge of this vibrant, exciting interdisciplinary field.