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PERFORMING ARTS

The Culture of Kitharoidia
Timothy Power
The Culture of Kitharoidia is the first study dedicated exclusively to the art, practice, and charismatic persona of the citharode. Traversing a wide range of discourse and imagery about kitharoidia--poetic and prose texts, iconography, inscriptions--the book offers a nuanced account of the aesthetic and sociocultural complexities of citharodic song and examines the iconic role of the songmakers in the popular imagination.
Paperback January 2009
Genos Dikanikon
Victor Bers
Under the Athenian democracy, litigants were expected to speak for themselves, though they could memorize a speech written for them. These amateur performances often manifested an unmanly yielding to emotions of anger or fear; professional speech, Bers seeks to demonstrate, was to a large degree crafted in reaction to amateur stumbling.
Paperback January 2009
Born in Flames
Howard Hampton
Twenty years as an outsider scouring the underbelly of American culture has made Howard Hampton a uniquely hardnosed guide to the heart of pop darkness. Bridging the fatalistic, intensely charged space between Apocalypse Now Redux and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," his writing breaks down barriers of ignorance and arrogance that have segregated art forms from each other and from the world at large. Born in Flames is a headlong plunge into the passions and disruptive power of art.
Paperback April 2008
Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture
Dudley Andrew
Steven Ungar
Andrew and Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.
Paperback March 2008
Making Dead Birds
Robert Gardner
This detailed and candid account of the process of making Gardner’s classic Dead Birds is more than the chronicle of a single work. Gardner’s classic Dead Birds is one of the most highly acclaimed and controversial documentary films ever made. It is also a thoughtful examination of what it meant to record the moving and violent rituals of warrior-farmers in the New Guinea highlands and to present to the world a graphic story of their behavior as a window onto our own. This book not only addresses the art and practice of filmmaking, but also explores issues of representation and the discovery of meaning in human lives.
Paperback March 2008
The Impulse to Preserve
Robert Gardner
Foreword by Charles Simic
In The Impulse to Preserve, filmmaker Robert Gardner reflects on a life spent observing, recording, and illuminating the human condition in some of the most remote regions of the world. Originally published in 2006, this lavishly illustrated book is now distributed by the Peabody Museum Press.
Hardcover March 2008