“The Wizard of Oz and Wicked”

2018 ◽  
pp. 205-222
Author(s):  
Paul R. Laird
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
First Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Wizard Of Oz ◽  
Successful Attempt ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
New Interpretation

This chapter brings new insights to Wicked, the most successful attempt to rework Baum’s story since the 1939 movie. Wicked is the biggest musical hit of the early twenty-first century, but its phenomenal success would never have been possible without its close ties to The Wizard of Oz. Based on Gregory Maguire’s novel by the same name that turns L. Frank Baum’s story on its head, the musical Wicked makes the Wicked Witch of the West a misunderstood young woman doing battle with a wizard who is an interloper from another world that has taken over Oz and made the Talking Animals scapegoats for all of the land’s ills. Despite their new interpretation of the familiar tale, the show’s creators wanted to include as many resonances as possible from the famed MGM film, a crusade that took them into difficult legal waters that resulted in unwelcome changes to the show courtesy of lawyers at Universal Pictures, the show’s principal producer. This chapter is a consideration of how Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, the writers of Wicked, appropriated narrative and musical aspects of Baum’s original book and the 1939 film, where they ran into problems in doing so, and how some of those problems were solved.

“Beyond the Rainbow”

2018 ◽  
pp. 223-240
Author(s):  
Walter Frisch
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Wizard Of Oz ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Iconic Status

To paraphrase one of the most famous lines in movie history, we are not in Kansas—or in Oz—anymore. Nevertheless, the songs of The Wizard of Oz have continued to resonate well beyond the 1939 MGM film, extending deep into the political, cultural, and social contexts of the early twenty-first century. This chapter explores something of the afterlives of the songs, with a special focus on the most popular one, “Over the Rainbow,” which has achieved iconic status over the past eighty years. And if there is any overarching legacy of the songs, it is perhaps the idea that however much we dream or hope, we should not give up our home, our roots.

Slavery and the Trumpocene: It's Not the End of the World

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Claire Colebrook
Keyword(s):  
Living System ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
The West ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Geological Period

There is something more catastrophic than the end of the world, especially when ‘world’ is understood as the horizon of meaning and expectation that has composed the West. If the Anthropocene is the geological period marking the point at which the earth as a living system has been altered by ‘anthropos,’ the Trumpocene marks the twenty-first-century recognition that the destruction of the planet has occurred by way of racial violence, slavery and annihilation. Rather than saving the world, recognizing the Trumpocene demands that we think about destroying the barbarism that has marked the earth.

Continuing Visions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Social Activism ◽  
William Blake ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ridley Scott ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Protest Group ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Dead Man

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.

Contrasting patterns of early twenty-first-century glacier mass change in the Himalayas

Nature ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 488 (7412) ◽  
pp. 495-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Kääb ◽  
Etienne Berthier ◽  
Christopher Nuth ◽  
Julie Gardelle ◽  
Yves Arnaud
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Mass Change ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century

Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
The West ◽  
City Life ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Point Of Departure

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.

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