Circus and Culture

Circus and Culture
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 232
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ISBN-10 : UOM:39015010698226
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 ( Downloads)

Book Synopsis Circus and Culture by : Paul Bouissac

Download or read book Circus and Culture written by Paul Bouissac and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaching the circus from the unique perspective of on who not only knows about language and sign systems but has actually been the owner and manager of an experimental circus, Paul Bouissac has written a pioneering book that will fascinate students of communication, popular culture, symbolic anthropology, and poetics, as well as semioticians an readers in a variety of fields who are concerned with "performance" as an aspect of culture. Seen from the semiotic viewpoint, the circus is a complex medium of mass communication with a dazzling variety of expressive means at its disposal (costumes, music, lightning, kinesis, props, and accessories, etc.) Bouissac has extended the analysis of his celebrated essay "Poetics in the Lions's Den" (which performs a chapter in the present book) to cover a wide panorama of traditional circus acts: acrobatics, equestrian acts, jugglers' and magicians' routines, and of course clown performances (discussed here as metacultural texts). He shows that all these acts are governed by an internal logic and that when taken in sequence, they exhibit both complementarity and a network of cross-references that bind them into a single circus "text", rich in cultural meaning. Each act can be seen to progress in terms of a dialectic of control and disturbance, which culminates in a triumphant reassertion of the performer's mastery over his environment and thus this consolidation of his position as "hero". The cultural potency of this symbolic cycle is attested by its being a perennial source of satisfaction to circus-goers of all ages and all social classes. "The circus is the living depository of certain of the most ancient arts of civilization. Through it, man continues to communicate with animals and with some of the higher powers lying within the normal aptitudes of the species, which, for this reason, is endowed in our exes with supernatural prestige. We can congratulate ourselves that Professor Bouissac, who has been himself a man of the circus, has had the same time the intellectual capacity and the literary talent required to elaborate a theory which has always been lacking and which this book presents in a particularly brilliant manner," - Claude Lévi-Strauss Blurb Klappentext


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