New Books in Performing Arts

Part 3 features close-readings of some of the play’s most significant speeches, with Professor Stephen Foley. Through Henry’s private soliloquy, we trace his moments of insight and blindness. In the Chorus’s inspiring invitation to the audience to recreate the Battle of Agincourt in their minds, and in Henry’s stirring speech to his own troops before the battle, we see how Shakespeare’s words shap...

As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian t...

A cultural revolution in England, France, and the United States beginning during the time of the industrial and political revolutions helped usher in modernity. This cultural revolution worked alongside the better documented political and economic revolutions to usher in the modern era of continuous revolution. Focusing on the period between 1847 and 1937, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Mod...

Part 2 opens with a discussion of the history play genre and of how history shapes and constrains the plays’ protagonists. With Professor Stephen Foley, we then explore the complex character of Henry himself, asking why this figure has given rise to so many conflicting interpretations and how Henry’s unique political role should influence the way we judge him. Finally, we trace the arc of the play...

Alien Territory: Radical, Experimental, & Irrelevant Music in 1970s San Diego (Billingsgate Media, 2023) is the untold story of a sleepy Navy town that became the unlikely gathering point for some of the most innovative, unclassifiable American artists of their time. The late 60s arrival of Harry Partch -- hobo composer, iconoclast and inventor of instruments such as the Harmonic Canon and Quadran...

From vampire apocalypses, shark attacks, witches, and ghosts, to murderous dolls bent on revenge, horror has been part of the American cinematic imagination for almost as long as pictures have moved on screens. But why do they captivate us so? What is the drive to be frightened, and why is it so perennially popular?  Why Horror Seduces (Oxford UP, 2017) addresses these questions through evolutiona...

What is the future of the global creative economy? In Creative Hustling: Women Making and Distributing Films from Nairobi (MIT Press, 2023), Robin Steedman, a postdoc in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School, offers a detailed analysis of the struggles and successes of women in Kenya’s capital city. The book draws on detailed fieldwork in Nairobi and...

In Surviving Squid Game: A Guide to K-Drama, Netflix, and Global Streaming Wars (Applause Books, 2023), scholar Suk-Young Kim reflects on Netflix's most-viewed series and one of the most influential Korean dramas, Squid Game. The series premiered in September 2021, when the pandemic cloud still hung heavy over viewers and seemed to mirror the societal ills COVID-19 brought to the surface. Kim expl...

In Begin Transmission: The Trans Allegories of The Matrix (BearManor Media, 2023), trans woman and screenwriter Tilly Bridges takes you through the trans allegories of the Matrix franchise, with deep dives into The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Animatrix, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix Resurrections, tracking one person's transition journey - from Thomas Anderson, to Neo... to Trinity....

Henry V is one of the most celebrated of Shakespeare’s history plays. In the 1590s, Shakespeare wrote a series of eight plays based on English chronicle history, telling the stories of civil wars and wars abroad, of the rise and fall of kings. Henry V was an English monarch who won great military victories in France in the early 1400s, and Shakespeare dramatizes his famous victory at Agincourt. In...

Then let the story really begin in 1968, though it has little to do with May. By chance it opens in January of that year, and it really concerns me rather than the world of political events, though these are always on my mind, as they were always on my mind. Future Imperfect: The Past Between My Fingers... (2021), Adrian Rifkin’s short Bildungsroman sets beside each other the fault lines of events...

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences t...

In her book, Punk Art History: Artworks from the European No Future Generation (Intellect Books, 2023), Marie Arleth Skov examines the punk movement of the 1970s to early 1980s. Through archival research, interviews, and an art historical analysis, Skov situates punk as an art movement. It is about pop, pain, poetry, presence, and about a ‘no future’ generation refusing to be the next artworld ava...

Tristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosenștok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) in...

In Part 3, Professor Tiffany Stern offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant speeches. You’ll discover the surprising biblical resonances in a speech by the foolish Bottom and see how the epilogue shifts the play from a story about magic to a magic spell placed on the audience itself. Speeches and Performers: Titania, 2.1, “Set your heart at rest: The Fairyland buys not the chil...

Song & Dance Man is an established classic, available again for Dylan fans and scholars alike on the 50th Anniversary of the original edition. The work in these three volumes has been called “Monumental, endlessly illuminating.” (Rolling Stone) “Probably the greatest book about the work of a single popular musician ever to have been published.” (London Review Bookshop) and "The definitive critical...

Part 2 addresses the play's central questions about comedy, tragedy, and passion by examining its language and plot motifs. Professor Tiffany Stern will guide you through the play’s sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, but always honest exploration of love — where it comes from and why it doesn’t always make sense. You’ll also discover how A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflects the way that Shakespeare...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most popular romantic comedies. At the same time, it’s a play that explores the darker and more dangerous side of love. Four young lovers flee into the forest where their romantic entanglements become even more entangled thanks to the magic of the fairy king, Oberon — who also puts a spell on his wife, Titania, so she falls in love with Bottom, a m...

Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (MIT Press, 2022), edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints th...

The story of the Minneapolis musicians who were unexpectedly summoned to re-record half of the songs on Bob Dylan's most acclaimed album. When Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks in New York in September 1974, it was a great album. But it was not the album now ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the ten best of all time. “When something’s not right, it’s wrong,” as Dylan puts it in “You’re Going...

What are the latest developments in the sociology of the arts? In Sociology of the Arts in Action: New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Arturo Rodríguez Morató, a Professor of Sociology and current Director of the CECUPS (Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and Society) at the University of Barcelona, and Alvaro Santana-Acuña, an Associate Profe...

In this conversation, we discuss Haleh Liza Gafori's masterful new translations of poetry by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian mystic and poet. Rumi's work is well-known in the West, but has often been encountered through the work of translators without direct knowledge of Persian language or culture. Haleh Liza Gafori's intimate knowledge of both, as well as her singer's knack for the sound of langu...

In 1983, an Ohio radio station called WOXY launched a sonic disruption to both corporate rock and to its conservative home region, programming an omnivorous range of genres and artists while being staunchly committed to local independent art and media. In the 1990s, as alternative rock went mainstream and radio grew increasingly homogeneous, WOXY gained international renown as one of Rolling Stone...

In Part 3, Professor Michael Dobson offers close-readings of some of the play’s most important speeches, including Brutus’s deliberation over Caesar’s assassination and the rival speeches given by Brutus and Antony to “Friends, Romans, countrymen” at Caesar’s funeral — speeches that display the potential power of rhetoric. Speeches and Performers: Brutus, 2.1, “It must be by his death …” (Anton Le...

Xiaomei Chen's book Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture (Columbia UP, 2023) looks at three "founding fathers" of Chinese spoken drama: Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian. Dr. Chen argues that these three theatre artists laid the groundwork for Mao-era Chinese drama during the earlier Republic period, and that there is more continuity between the two periods...