Books about Ritualized from Amazon.com

W. Anthony Sheppard considers a wide-ranging constellation of important musical works in this fascinating exploration of ritualized performance in twentieth-century music. Revealing Masks uncovers the range of political, didactic, and aesthetic intents that inspired the creators of modernist music theater. Sheppard is especially interested in the use of the "exotic" in techniques of masking and stylization, identifying Japanese Noh, medieval Christian drama, and ancient Greek theater as the most prominent exotic models for the creation of "total theater."

Drawing on an extraordinarily diverse-and in some instances, little-known-range of music theater pieces, Sheppard cites the work of Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Honegger, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harry Partch, and Leonard Bernstein, as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Madonna. Artists in literature, theater, and dance-such as William Butler Yeats, Paul Claudel, Bertolt Brecht, Isadora Duncan, Ida Rubenstein, and Edward Gordon Craig--also play a significant role in this study.

Sheppard poses challenging questions that will interest readers beyond those in the field of music scholarship. For example, what is the effect on the audience and the performers of depersonalizing ritual elements? Does borrowing from foreign cultures inevitably amount to a kind of predatory appropriation? Revealing Masks shows that compositional concerns and cultural themes manifested in music theater are central to the history of twentieth-century Euro-American music, drama, and dance..
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This book contains the work of seven leading anthropologists on the subject of ritualized homosexuality, and it marks the first time that anthropologists have systematically studied cross-cultural variations in homosexual behavior in a non-Western culture area. The book as a whole indicates that contemporary theories of sex and gender development need revision in light of the Melanesian findings..
Price: $69.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this bold work, Thomas Habinek offers an entirely new theoretical perspective on Roman cultural history. Although English words such as "literature" and "religion" have their origins in Latin, the Romans had no such specific concepts. Rather, much of the sense of these words was captured in the Latin word carmen, usually translated into English as "song." Habinek argues that for the Romans, "song" encompassed a wide range of ritualized speech, including elements of poetry, storytelling, and even the casting of spells.

Habinek begins with the fraternal societies, or sodalitates, which predated the Republic and endured into the Imperial era, and whose rites, although adapted over time to different deities and cults, were from the beginning centered on song (perhaps most notably in the ancient Carmen Saliare). He goes on to show how this early use of song became a paradigm for cultural reproduction throughout Roman history. Ritual mastery of the chaos of everyday life, embodied and enacted in song, produced and transmitted the beliefs on which Roman culture was founded and by which Roman communities were sustained. By the emergence of the Empire, "song," in all of its senses, served in particular to reproduce the power of the state, organizing relations of power at every level of society.

The World of Roman Song presents a systematic and comprehensive approach to Roman cultural history. Informed and imaginative, this book challenges classicists, social theorists, and literary scholars to engage in a provocative discussion of the power of song.

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How does God feel when children are sadistically abused? How does God protect these children without violating humanity’s free will? And years later, how does God assist in the healing process?

Sundering Undone is the true story of five women who discovered the nature of God within and beyond themselves as they traveled through a profound healing experience. It explores the multiplicity of mind and soul as the divine protective mechanism by which children survive otherwise unbearable abuse. Sundering Undone takes you deep within the mind to a healing place, to beings of light, to miracles and revelations, to the core of self, to God.

… “Let them rant and bloody and shatter
But know this: you were never alone
for all their slaughtering
I hid and protected your core.

Every tear ever shed, every scream
ever uttered, echoes in my heart.
And at a time known only to me
I will make it right
To each of my delicate, dear
Females ever sullied.”

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Price: $7.22 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on March 1, 2002. The length of the article is 2930 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts & Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Musical Theater. (Historical Topics).
Author: Tamara Levitz
Publication:Notes (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 2002
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: 58 Issue: 3 Page: 556(5)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This digital document is an article from Canadian Journal of History, published by University of Saskatchewan on December 1, 2002. The length of the article is 769 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Sovereign and His Counsellors: Ritualized Consultations in Muscovite Political Culture, 1350s-1570s.(Book Review) (book review)
Author: A.M. Kleimola
Publication:Canadian Journal of History (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2002
Publisher: University of Saskatchewan
Volume: 37 Issue: 3 Page: 514(2)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Pragmatics, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The skillful use of joking to achieve characterization, within the essentially male world of the recent American film, Sling Blade, is the focus of this paper. The elusive yet socially highly significant notion of 'sense of humor' is assumed to reveal itself in social practice through joking interaction. For an appropriate analysis of situated discursive practice, I take a broad interpretation of 'joking', within an interactional sociolinguistic framework, to indicate any shift of footing from 'serious' to 'non-serious', whether signalled proactively or retroactively in the interaction, whether taken up or not by other interlocutors. Characterization is achieved through different styles of joking, representing typifications of gender role behavior within the rural American Southern world of the film. Good ol' boy Bill, the fix-it shop owner, uses typical solidarity joking, including ritualized joking associated with conversational routines, narrative jokes, and teasing or 'ritual insult' joking. Bigoted and abusive 'redneck' Doyle uses joking to express his own hostility, either in the form of sarcasm, or as a retroactive 'cover' for his intentionally insulting remarks. Vaughn, a gay man, uses irony as his main style, symbolic of his veiled gender identity. Karl and Frank, who have the most important emotional bond in the movie in the form of a friendship across generations, engage in the only joking which constitutes a true empathic connection. The main female character, Frank's mother Linda, existing in an essentially male world in the screenplay, operates in a mode of seriousness, participating in joking only by responding as socially required. Her one ambiguous attempt at joking, as a social control move on Doyle, is ineffectual. A narrative dirty joke, first occurring among men at the fix-it shop, is used effectively for characterization when Karl later tries to tell it to Linda in the mistaken belief that it constitutes an appropriate way to be sociable. Billy Bob Thornton, a native of rural Arkansas in the American South, not only wrote and adapted the screenplay for the film (for which he won an Academy Award in 1996), but also directed the film, and portrayed the starring character. The joking styles are analyzed as aesthetic typifications which can be used in the service of characterization. The treatment of joking within Brown and Levinson's (1987) pragmatic framework is critiqued, and a more comprehensive analysis is offered, one which combines the pragmalinguistic and the sociopragmatic. .
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