Film art phenomena

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George Perle

George Perle takes us into the composer's workshop as he reevaluates what we call "twentieth-century music"--A term used to refer to new or modern or contemporary music that represents a radical break from the tonal tradition, or "common practice," of the preceding three centuries. He proposes that this music, in the course of breaking with the tonal tradition, presents coherent and definable elements of a new tradition. In spite of the disparity in their styles, idioms, and compositional methods, he argues, what unites Scriabin, Stravinsky, Bartok, and the Viennese circle (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) is more important than what separates them. If we are to understand the connections among these mainstream composers, we also have to understand their connections with the past. Through an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of a single piece by Varese, Density 21.5 for unaccompanied flute, Perle shows how these composers refer not only to their contemporaries but also to Wagner, Debussy, and Beethoven. Perle isolates the years 1909-10 as the moment of revolutionary transformation in the foundational premises of our musical language. He asks: What are the implications of this revolution, not only for the composer, but also for the listener? What are the consequences for the theory and teaching of music today? In his highly original answers, Perle relates the role of intuition in the listening experience to its role in the compositional process. Perle asserts that the post-Schoenbergian serialists have preoccupied themselves with secondary and superficial aspects of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method that have led it to a dead end but he also exposes the speciousness of current alternatives such as chance music, minimalism, and the so-called return to tonality. He offers a new and more comprehensive definition of "twelve-tone music" and firmly rejects the notion that accessibility to the new music is reserved for a special class of elite listeners [Publisher description].

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W. Martin Bloomer

Latinity and Literary Society at Rome reaches back to the early Roman empire to examine attitudes toward Latinity, reviewing the contested origins of scholarly Latin in the polemical arena of Roman literature. W. Martin Bloomer shows how that literature's reflections on correct and incorrect speech functioned as part of a wider understanding of social relations and national identity in Rome. Bloomer's investigation begins with questions about the sociology of Latin literature - what interests were served by the creation of high style and how literary stylization constituted a system of social decorum - and goes on to offer readings of selected texts. Through studies of works ranging from Varro's De lingua latina to the verse fables of Augustus's freedman Phaedrus to the Annals of Tacitus, Bloomer examines conflicting claims to style not simply to set true Latin against vulgarism but also to ask who is excluding whom, why, and by what means. These texts exemplify the ways Roman literature employs representations of and reflections on proper and improper language to mirror the interests of specific groups who wished to maintain or establish their place in Roman society. They show how writers sought to influence the fundamental social issue of who had the power to confer legitimacy of speech and how their works used claims of linguistic propriety to reinforce the definition of "Romanness.". Through Bloomer's study Latinity emerges as a contested field of identity and social polemic heretofore unrecognized in classical scholarship. With its fresh interpretations of major and minor texts, Latinity and Literary Society at Rome is a literary history that significantly advances our understanding of the place of language in ancient Rome.

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Nathalie Aubert

Poète belge de langue française, Christian Dotremont (1922-1979) a poursuivi, tant au sein des grandes avant-gardes artistiques du XXe siècle (le surréalisme, le surréalisme-révolutionnaire et Cobra) qu'individuellement, une recherche personnelle qui l'a placé non seulement au coeur des débats littéraires et philosophiques de son temps, mais aussi, comme nombre d'artistes de sa génération, au centre des débats éthiques et politiques. Cet ouvrage retrace l'intégralité de son parcours.

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David Krasner

The history of African American performance and theatre is a topic that few scholars have closely studied or discussed as a critical part of American culture. In this fascinating interdisciplinary volume, David Krasner reveals such a history to be a tremendously rich one, focusing particularly on the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The fields of history, black literary theory, cultural studies, performance studies, and postcolonial theory are utilized in an examination of several major productions. In addition, Krasner looks at the aesthetic significance of African American performers on the American stage and the meaning of the technique entitled "cakewalking."