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Series:
Sinica Leidensia, Volume: 169
Author:
In a fourth-century tale, two farmers get lost in a pleasure grotto and unwittingly sever their fragile ties with the mortal world. Surprisingly, this simple cautionary fantasy spawned a complex literary tradition. The narrative instability of the tale was part of its snowballing appeal. Early in the tale’s journey through literary history, the girls met by the farmers morphed into female entertainers, Daoist priestesses, and spiritual transcendents. This malleability offered a wealth of artistic possibilities. The feature of “time dilation” and its associated dangers was also to become a flexible literary instrument and a defining feature of grotto fantasy literature.
Series:
Sinica Leidensia, Volume: 169
Author:
In a fourth-century tale, two farmers get lost in a pleasure grotto and unwittingly sever their fragile ties with the mortal world. Surprisingly, this simple cautionary fantasy spawned a complex literary tradition. The narrative instability of the tale was part of its snowballing appeal. Early in the tale’s journey through literary history, the girls met by the farmers morphed into female entertainers, Daoist priestesses, and spiritual transcendents. This malleability offered a wealth of artistic possibilities. The feature of “time dilation” and its associated dangers was also to become a flexible literary instrument and a defining feature of grotto fantasy literature.
Our contemporary society is obsessed with the idea of self-optimization, a concept that implies the need to constantly work on improving oneself and one’s appearance. The roots of postmodern self-optimization, however, lie in the cultural industries that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its equally profound and transient interest in new forms of expression, new ways of life, and new technologies, modernism thoroughly and critically embraced the idea of the self as something that can be created and recreated, either in accordance with or in contradiction to social norms. This book explores strategies of self-optimization developed in modernist literature and culture. In doing so, it offers a panoramic view of an often-overlooked aspect of European and North American modernity that anticipates our current postmodern crisis of the self.
Series:
Literary Modernism, Volume: 9
Our contemporary society is obsessed with the idea of self-optimization, a concept that implies the need to constantly work on improving oneself and one’s appearance. The roots of postmodern self-optimization, however, lie in the cultural industries that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its equally profound and transient interest in new forms of expression, new ways of life, and new technologies, modernism thoroughly and critically embraced the idea of the self as something that can be created and recreated, either in accordance with or in contradiction to social norms. This book explores strategies of self-optimization developed in modernist literature and culture. In doing so, it offers a panoramic view of an often-overlooked aspect of European and North American modernity that anticipates our current postmodern crisis of the self.
Rust Belt and the Ruhr
Durch Prozesse der Deindustrialisierung haben sich im Ruhrgebiet und im Rust Belt nicht nur die wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der beiden Regionen verändert, sondern auch das soziale, kulturelle und räumliche Gefüge. Anhand der beiden ehemaligen Industrieregionen wird beispielhaft herausgearbeitet, wie etwa Landschaften, Architekturen, Materialitäten oder Immaterialitäten unaufhörlichen Überformungen und Transformationsprozessen unterworfen sind – auch und vor allem aus ästhetischer Perspektive. Der Band rückt diese Dynamiken von Stadt- und Regionsgebilden ins Zentrum und untersucht sie als Elemente von Schichtungen. Dabei geht er der Frage nach, wie die beiden Regionen konstruiert und ästhetisch produziert werden und welche Funktion dabei Schichtungsprozessen zukommt.
Rust Belt and the Ruhr
Durch Prozesse der Deindustrialisierung haben sich im Ruhrgebiet und im Rust Belt nicht nur die wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der beiden Regionen verändert, sondern auch das soziale, kulturelle und räumliche Gefüge. Anhand der beiden ehemaligen Industrieregionen wird beispielhaft herausgearbeitet, wie etwa Landschaften, Architekturen, Materialitäten oder Immaterialitäten unaufhörlichen Überformungen und Transformationsprozessen unterworfen sind – auch und vor allem aus ästhetischer Perspektive. Der Band rückt diese Dynamiken von Stadt- und Regionsgebilden ins Zentrum und untersucht sie als Elemente von Schichtungen. Dabei geht er der Frage nach, wie die beiden Regionen konstruiert und ästhetisch produziert werden und welche Funktion dabei Schichtungsprozessen zukommt.
Bent Legs on Strange Grounds, 1982–2023
Author:
In Butoh and Suzuki Performance in Australia: Bent Legs on Strange Grounds, 1982-2023, Marshall considers how the originally Japanese forms of butoh dance and Suzuki’s theatre reconfigure historical lineages to find ancient yet transcultural ancestors within Australia and beyond. Marshall argues that artists working in Australia with butoh and Suzuki techniques develop conflicted yet compelling diasporic, multicultural, spiritually and corporeally compelling interpretations of theatrical practice. Marshall puts at the centre of butoh historiography the work of Tess de Quincey, Yumi Umiumare, Tony Yap, Lynne Bradley, Simon Woods, Frances Barbe, and Australian Suzuki practitioners Jacqui Carroll and John Nobbs.
Jonathan W. Marshall’s Bent Legs on Strange Grounds is an important contribution to the body of literature on butoh, as well as to studies of dance in Australia that will be valuable to practitioners and scholars alike. Detailed discussions of Australian butoh artists open up consideration of how global and local histories, migrations, and landscapes not only were key to butoh’s formation in Japan, but also to its continued development around the world. Attention to butoh’s emplacement in Australia, Marshall convincingly argues, reveals insights about national identity, race, power, and more that are relevant well beyond the Australian performance context.
— Rosemary Candelario, Texas Woman’s University, co-editor, Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2018)
Marshall’s Bent Legs on Strange Grounds explores the remarkable transformative era of Australia’s reconsideration of its place in the region. A definitive study of Australian experiments in butoh and the theatrical vision of Suzuki Tadashi, the book shows how new corporeal and spatial dramaturgies of the Japanese avant-garde fundamentally changed Australian performance. Expansively researched and annotated, this impressive study connects Australian performance after the New Wave with globalization, postmodern dance, Indigeneity, and subcultures, and it details the work of leading Australian/Asian artists. Bent Legs on Strange Grounds speaks about the development of embodied knowledge and the consequential refiguration of Australia’s sense of being in the world. It is also a study of butoh and Suzuki’s legacy in global terms, wherein Australian experimental performance also becomes something larger than itself.
— Peter Eckersall, The Graduate Center, CUNY, author of Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan (2013).
Jonathan W. Marshall’s Bent Legs on Strange Grounds is an important contribution to the body of literature on butoh, as well as to studies of dance in Australia that will be valuable to practitioners and scholars alike. Detailed discussions of Australian butoh artists open up consideration of how global and local histories, migrations, and landscapes not only were key to butoh’s formation in Japan, but also to its continued development around the world. Attention to butoh’s emplacement in Australia, Marshall convincingly argues, reveals insights about national identity, race, power, and more that are relevant well beyond the Australian performance context.
— Rosemary Candelario, Texas Woman’s University, co-editor, Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2018)
Marshall’s Bent Legs on Strange Grounds explores the remarkable transformative era of Australia’s reconsideration of its place in the region. A definitive study of Australian experiments in butoh and the theatrical vision of Suzuki Tadashi, the book shows how new corporeal and spatial dramaturgies of the Japanese avant-garde fundamentally changed Australian performance. Expansively researched and annotated, this impressive study connects Australian performance after the New Wave with globalization, postmodern dance, Indigeneity, and subcultures, and it details the work of leading Australian/Asian artists. Bent Legs on Strange Grounds speaks about the development of embodied knowledge and the consequential refiguration of Australia’s sense of being in the world. It is also a study of butoh and Suzuki’s legacy in global terms, wherein Australian experimental performance also becomes something larger than itself.
— Peter Eckersall, The Graduate Center, CUNY, author of Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan (2013).
Bent Legs on Strange Grounds, 1982–2023
Author:
In Butoh and Suzuki Performance in Australia: Bent Legs on Strange Grounds, 1982-2023, Marshall considers how the originally Japanese forms of butoh dance and Suzuki’s theatre reconfigure historical lineages to find ancient yet transcultural ancestors within Australia and beyond. Marshall argues that artists working in Australia with butoh and Suzuki techniques develop conflicted yet compelling diasporic, multicultural, spiritually and corporeally compelling interpretations of theatrical practice. Marshall puts at the centre of butoh historiography the work of Tess de Quincey, Yumi Umiumare, Tony Yap, Lynne Bradley, Simon Woods, Frances Barbe, and Australian Suzuki practitioners Jacqui Carroll and John Nobbs.
Jonathan W. Marshall’s Bent Legs on Strange Grounds is an important contribution to the body of literature on butoh, as well as to studies of dance in Australia that will be valuable to practitioners and scholars alike. Detailed discussions of Australian butoh artists open up consideration of how global and local histories, migrations, and landscapes not only were key to butoh’s formation in Japan, but also to its continued development around the world. Attention to butoh’s emplacement in Australia, Marshall convincingly argues, reveals insights about national identity, race, power, and more that are relevant well beyond the Australian performance context.
— Rosemary Candelario, Texas W
Jonathan W. Marshall’s Bent Legs on Strange Grounds is an important contribution to the body of literature on butoh, as well as to studies of dance in Australia that will be valuable to practitioners and scholars alike. Detailed discussions of Australian butoh artists open up consideration of how global and local histories, migrations, and landscapes not only were key to butoh’s formation in Japan, but also to its continued development around the world. Attention to butoh’s emplacement in Australia, Marshall convincingly argues, reveals insights about national identity, race, power, and more that are relevant well beyond the Australian performance context.
— Rosemary Candelario, Texas W