Scenes from Bourgeois Life

Scenes from Bourgeois Life
Author: Nicholas Ridout
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2020-06-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472126881

Scenes from Bourgeois Life proposes that theatre spectatorship has made a significant contribution to the historical development of a distinctive bourgeois sensibility, characterized by the cultivation of distance. In Nicholas Ridout’s formulation, this distance is produced and maintained at two different scales. First is the distance of the colonial relation, not just in miles between Jamaica and London, but also the social, economic, and psychological distances involved in that relation. The second is the distance of spectatorship, not only of the modern theatregoer as consumer, but the larger and pervasive disposition to observe, comment, and sit in judgment, which becomes characteristic of the bourgeois relation to the rest of the world. This engagingly written study of history, class, and spectatorship offers compelling proof of “why theater matters,” and demonstrates the importance of examining the question historically.

Now, Now, Louison

Now, Now, Louison
Author: Jean Frémon
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2019-03-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811228533

Financial Times Book of the Year The extraordinary artist, the spider woman, the intellectual, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the “good girl” sing together in this exuberant, lithe text beautifully translated by Cole Swensen. This brilliant portrait of the renowned artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) shows a woman who was devoted to her art and whose life was also that of her century. The art world’s grande dame and its shameless old lady, spinning personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks with her characteristic insolence and wit, through a most discreet, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and adult life in America, to her death, this phosphorescent novella describes Bourgeois’s inner life as only one artist regarding another can. Included as an afterword is Frémon’s essay about his own “portrait writing” and how he came to know and work with Louise Bourgeois.

Theater of Capital

Theater of Capital
Author: Alisa Zhulina
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2024-01-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0810146363

Reads canonical works of modern drama in relation to the economic ideas of their era Emerging amid the turbulent rise of market finance and wider socioeconomic changes, modern drama enacted vital critiques of art and life under capitalism. Alisa Zhulina shows how fin-de-siècle playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, and Gerhart Hauptmann interrogated the meaning of this newly coined economic concept. Acutely aware of their complicity in the system they sought to challenge, these playwrights staged economic questions as moral and political concerns, using their plays to explore the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and others within the boundaries of bourgeois theater. Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life reveals the prescient and unsettling visions of life in a new financial and societal reality in now-canonical plays such as A Doll’s House, Miss Julie, and The Cherry Orchard, as well as in lesser-known and long-overlooked works. This wide-ranging study prompts us to reevaluate modern drama and its legacy for the urgent economic and political questions that haunt our present moment.

Scenes of Bohemian Life

Scenes of Bohemian Life
Author: Henry Murger
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2023-10-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1839988819

This bookis a new translation of Henry Murger’s influential Scènes de la vie de bohème, first published in French in 1851. The book recounts the lives of a bohemian group of creative young people as they fall in and out of love, endure cold and hunger, enjoy drunken parties, see their friends suffer and die of poverty, and finally emerge as mature artists. The book's publication soon inspired many (mostly young) people to seek out a bohemian life in Paris and other cities around the world. Not only did it inspire people at the time to change their lives, it also inspired Puccini’s beloved opera La Bohème(1896) and, a hundred years later, Jonathan Larson’s phenomenally successful Rent (1996). Few works of literature have had such a social impact. Bohemian cultures and subcultures have been with us ever since and Murger’s book remains an engaging and satisfying work of literature.

Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary
Author: Gustave Flaubert
Publisher: Bantam Classics
Total Pages: 514
Release: 1982-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0553213415

This exquisite novel tells the story of one of the most compelling heroines in modern literature--Emma Bovary. "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgement." - Henry James Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy provincial doctor, Emma revolts against the ordinariness of her life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstasy and love. But her sensuous and sentimental desires lead her only to suffering corruption and downfall. A brilliant psychological portrait, Madame Bovary searingly depicts the human mind in search of transcendence. Who is Madame Bovary? Flaubert's answer to this question was superb: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Acclaimed as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1857, the work catapulted Flaubert to the ranks of the world's greatest novelists. This volume, with its fine translation by Lowell Bair, a perceptive introduction by Leo Bersani, and a complete supplement of essays and critical comments, is the indispensable Madame Bovary.

Bobos in Paradise

Bobos in Paradise
Author: David Brooks
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2010-05-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1416561730

In his bestselling work of “comic sociology,” David Brooks coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today’s upper class—those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture. Their hybrid lifestyle is the atmosphere we breathe, and in this witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age, Brooks has defined a new generation. Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do you work for one of those visionary software companies where people come to work wearing hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot? If so, you might be a Bobo.

Modernity and Bourgeois Life

Modernity and Bourgeois Life
Author: Jerrold Seigel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 639
Release: 2012-04-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107379474

To be modern may mean many different things, but for nineteenth-century Europeans 'modernity' suggested a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes and values all played key roles. Jerrold Seigel's panoramic new history offers a magisterial and highly original account of the ties between modernity and bourgeois life, arguing that they can be best understood not in terms of the rise and fall of social classes, but as features of a common participation in expanding and thickening 'networks of means' that linked together distant energies and resources across economic, political and cultural life. Exploring the different configurations of these networks in England, France and Germany, he shows how their patterns gave rise to distinctive forms of modernity in each country and shaped the rhythm and nature of change across spheres as diverse as politics, money and finance, gender relations, morality, and literary, artistic and musical life.

Joseph Addison

Joseph Addison
Author: Dan Poston
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2023-12-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813950414

The name Joseph Addison was once synonymous with the finest of English prose. Eminent writers from Voltaire to Lord Macaulay to John Steinbeck considered him a consummate master to be studied and emulated. According to Benjamin Franklin, Addison’s writings "contributed more to the improvement of the minds of the British nation, and polishing their manner, than those of any other English pen whatever." While his influence lives on in the sound and style of English today, the fame of this literary role model has faded from popular awareness. The Addisonian spirit, which ushered in an exceptional era of domestic peace in Britain and provided inspiration for the French and American Revolutions, coded many of the constitutional, political, and social agreements we continue to live with today. This book, the first comprehensive monograph of Addison in half a century, considers Addison’s contribution through an in-depth exploration of his writings, political work, social life, and theatrical stagings.