Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde

Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde
Author: Julia Vaingurt
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2013-05-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0810166526

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In postrevolutionary Russia, as the Soviet government was initiating a program of rapid industrialization, avant-garde artists declared their intent to serve the nascent state and to transform life in accordance with their aesthetic designs. In spite of their professed utilitarianism, however, most avant-gardists created works that can hardly be regarded as practical instruments of societal transformation. Exploring this paradox, Vaingurt claims that the artists’ investment of technology with aesthetics prevented their creations from being fully conscripted into the arsenal of political hegemony. The purposes of avant-garde technologies, she contends, are contemplative rather than constructive. Looking at Meyerhold’s theater, Tatlin’s and Khlebnikov’s architectural designs, Mayakovsky’s writings, and other works from the period, Vaingurt offers an innovative reading of an exceptionally complex moment in the formation of Soviet culture.

Wonderland

Wonderland
Author: Beth Steel
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2014-07-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0571321380

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The Midlands, 1984. Two young lads are about to learn what it is to be a miner, to be accepted into the close camaraderie and initiated into a unique workplace where sweat, toil, collapsing roofs and explosions are all to be met with bawdy humour. London, 1984. A conflicted Tory MP, a brash American CEO and an eccentric maverick are the face of a radical Conservative government preparing to do battle with the most powerful workforce, the miners. As the two sides clash, the miners fight for their livelihoods and families, and the government for its vision of a free Britain. Together they change the fabric of the nation forever. Wonderland by Beth Steel premiered at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in June 2014.

Adaptation and the Avant-Garde

Adaptation and the Avant-Garde
Author: William Verrone
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-09-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1441134182

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Adaptations have occurred regularly since the beginning of cinema, but little recognition has been given to avant-garde adaptations of literary or other texts. This compelling study corrects such omissions by detailing the theory and practice of alternative adaptation practices from major avant-garde directors. Avant-Garde films are often relegated to the margins because they challenge our traditional notions of what film form and style can accomplish. Directors who choose to adapt previous material run the risk of severe critical dismay; making films that are highly subjective interpretations or representations of existing texts takes courage and foresight. An avant-garde adaptation provokes spectators by making them re-think what they know about film itself, just as much as the previous source material. Adaptation and the Avant-Garde examines films by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard, Guy Maddin, Jan Svankmajer and many others, offering illuminating insights and making us reconsider the nature of adaptation, appropriation, borrowing, and the re-imagining of previous sources.

Wonderland

Wonderland
Author: Steven Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2016-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0399184481

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“A house of wonders itself. . . . Wonderland inspires grins and well-what-d'ya-knows” —The New York Times Book Review From the New York Times–bestselling author of How We Got to Now and Extra Life, a look at the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained. This lushly illustrated history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused. Johnson’s storytelling is just as delightful as the inventions he describes, full of surprising stops along the journey from simple concepts to complex modern systems. He introduces us to the colorful innovators of leisure: the explorers, proprietors, showmen, and artists who changed the trajectory of history with their luxurious wares, exotic meals, taverns, gambling tables, and magic shows. In Wonderland, Johnson compellingly argues that observers of technological and social trends should be looking for clues in novel amusements. You’ll find the future wherever people are having the most fun.

The Director's Prism

The Director's Prism
Author: Dassia N. Posner
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2016-08-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0810133571

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Finalist, 2017 Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Award Shortlist, 2019 Prague Quadrennial Best Scenography and Design Publication Award The Director's Prism investigates how and why three of Russia's most innovative directors— Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein—used the fantastical tales of German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann to reinvent the rules of theatrical practice. Because the rise of the director and the Russian cult of Hoffmann closely coincided, Posner argues, many characteristics we associate with avant-garde theater—subjective perspective, breaking through the fourth wall, activating the spectator as a co-creator—become uniquely legible in the context of this engagement. Posner examines the artistic poetics of Meyerhold's grotesque, Tairov's mime-drama, and Eisenstein's theatrical attraction through production analyses, based on extensive archival research, that challenge the notion of theater as a mirror to life, instead viewing the director as a prism through whom life is refracted. A resource for scholars and practitioners alike, this groundbreaking study provides a fresh, provocative perspective on experimental theater, intercultural borrowings, and the nature of the creative process.

Alice in Japanese Wonderlands

Alice in Japanese Wonderlands
Author: Amanda Kennell
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0824896874

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Since the first translations of Lewis Carroll's Alice books appeared in Japan in 1899, Alice has found her way into nearly every facet of Japanese life and popular culture. The books have been translated into Japanese more than 500 times, resulting in more editions of these works in Japanese than any other language except English. Generations of Japanese children learned English from textbooks containing Alice excerpts. Japan's internationally famous fashion vogue, Lolita, merges Alice with French Rococo style. In Japan Alice is everywhere--in manga, literature, fine art, live-action film and television shows, anime, video games, clothing, restaurants, and household goods consumed by people of all ages and genders. In Alice in Japanese Wonderlands, Amanda Kennell traverses the breadth of Alice's Japanese media environment, starting in 1899 and continuing through 60s psychedelia and 70s intellectual fads to the present, showing how a set of nineteenth-century British children's books became a vital element in Japanese popular culture. Using Japan's myriad adaptations to investigate how this modern media landscape developed, Kennell reveals how Alice connects different fields of cultural production and builds cohesion out of otherwise disparate media, artists, and consumers. The first sustained examination of Japanese Alice adaptations, her work probes the meaning of Alice in Wonderland as it was adapted by a cast of characters that includes the "father of the Japanese short story," Ryūnosuke Akutagawa; the renowned pop artist Yayoi Kusama; and the best-selling manga collective CLAMP. While some may deride adaptive activities as mere copying, the form Alice takes in Japan today clearly reflects domestic considerations and creativity, not the desire to imitate. By engaging with studies of adaptation, literature, film, media, and popular culture, Kennell uses Japan's proliferation of Alices to explore both Alice and the Japanese media environment.

Modernism in Wonderland

Modernism in Wonderland
Author: John D. Morgenstern
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2024-01-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350248738

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Retracing the steps of a surprising array of 20th-century writers who ventured into the fantastical, topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll's fictions, this book demonstrates the full extent of Carroll's legacy in literary modernism. Testing the authority of language and mediation through extensive word-play and genre-bending, the Alice books undoubtedly prefigure literary modernism at its upmost experimental. The collection's chapters look beyond literary style to show how Carroll's writings had a far-reaching impact on modern life, from commercial culture to politics and philosophy. This book shows us the Alice we recognize from Carroll's novels but also the Alice modernist writers encountered through the looking-glass of these extraliterary discourses. Recovering a common touchstone between the likes of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and writers conventionally regarded on the periphery of modernist studies, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, and Vladimir Nabokov, this volume ultimately provides a new entry-point into a more broadly conceptualised global modernism.

Men in Wonderland

Men in Wonderland
Author: Catherine Robson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2018-06-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691187703

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Fascination with little girls pervaded Victorian culture. For many, girls represented the true essence of childhood or bygone times of innocence; but for middle-class men, especially writers, the interest ran much deeper. In Men in Wonderland, Catherine Robson explores the ways in which various nineteenth-century British male authors constructed girlhood, and analyzes the nature of their investment in the figure of the girl. In so doing, she reveals the link between the idealization of little girls and a widespread fantasy of male development--a myth suggesting that men become masculine only after an initial feminine stage, lived out in the protective environment of the nursery. Little girls, argues Robson, thus offer an adult male the best opportunity to reconnect with his own lost self. Tracing the beginnings of this myth in the writings of Romantics Wordsworth and De Quincey, Robson identifies the consolidation of this paradigm in numerous Victorian artifacts, ranging from literary works by Dickens and Barrett Browning, to paintings by Frith and Millais, to reports of the Royal Commission on Children's Employment. She analyzes Ruskin and Carroll's "high noon" of girl worship and investigates the destruction of the fantasy in the closing decades of the century, when social concerns about the working girl sexualized the image of young females. Men in Wonderland contributes to a growing interest in the nineteenth century's construction of childhood, sexuality, and masculinity, and illuminates their complex interconnections with a startlingly different light. Not only does it complicate the narratives of pedophilic desire that are generally used to explain figures like Ruskin and Carroll, but it offers a new understanding of the Victorian era's obsession with loss, its rampant sentimentality, and its intense valorization of the little girl at the expense of mature femininity.

Women in Wonderland

Women in Wonderland
Author: Elizabeth A Watry
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2023-08-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1606390562

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“Betsy Watry tells the tales of a dozen women, some of whom had short-lived adventures in Yellowstone National Park, but most of whom spent decades as rangers, scientists, interpreters, and entrepreneurs, shaping the Park’s physical and cultural landscape. This is a wonderful ‘hidden’ history, full of surprising stories, grounded in intensive research and written with charm.” —Dr. Mary Murphy, historian and author of Hope in Hard Times “For so long, Yellowstone National Park has needed a book about the women who stood and today stand tall in its history. At long last, Elizabeth Watry has produced it. Women across the nation should celebrate this book for its noteworthy contribution to women’s history, as we professional historians do.” Lee Whittlesey, Park Historian, National Park Service, —Yellowstone National Park “To read about Yellowstone National Park too often means viewing it through the eyes and exploits of men. By sharing the experiences and contributions of women who visited, lived, and worked in Yellowstone, Elizabeth Watry places women front and center in the Park’s wondrous history. Women in Wonderland is sure to become a treasured resource.” —Diane Smith, author of Letters from Yellowstone