Introduction

Author(s):  
Drew Massey

The chapter introduces the general perspective from which I consider the music of Thomas Adès from the beginning of his career up until The Exterminating Angel. Broadly speaking, I frame a consideration of his work as a dialectic, but also synthesis, of a variety of different themes in music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In particular, I orient the reader by briefly considering Adorno’s notion of a Musique Informelle, alongside a theory of cultural production for the twenty-first century known as “metamodernism.” While neither one of these frames of reference totally captures the dynamics of the music that I seek to explore in the chapters that follow, they provide a useful point of departure for considering why Adès’s music has attracted the attention that it has.

Author(s):  
Linda Freedman

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.


Tempo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (289) ◽  
pp. 30-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hunter Coblentz

AbstractThis article serves as an introduction to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical practices that have made use of glass instruments and objects. Emphasis is placed on those practices that use glass in a raw, acoustic manner, and those that take advantage of the precision with which glass can be tuned. First, a general history of glass music is presented, followed by an overview of the physical and acoustic aspects pertaining to the material that are relevant to those composers wishing to integrate glass into their works. Finally, the composers, performers and instrument builders who have made significant use of glass in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are surveyed.


Media expansion into the digital realm and the continuing segregation of users into niches has led to a proliferation of cultural products targeted to and consumed by women. Though often dismissed as frivolous or excessively emotional, feminized culture in reality offers compelling insights into the American experience of the early twenty-first century. This book brings together writings from feminist critics that chart the current terrain of feminized pop cultural production. Analyzing everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to Pinterest to pregnancy apps, contributors examine the economic, technological, representational, and experiential dimensions of products and phenomena that speak to, and about, the feminine. As these chapters show, the imperative of productivity currently permeating feminized pop culture has created a generation of texts that speak as much to women's roles as public and private workers as to an impulse for fantasy or escape. The book sheds new light on contemporary women's engagement with an array of media forms in the context of postfeminist culture and neoliberalism.


Author(s):  
Ricard Zapata-Barrero

This chapter explains how the emergent controversy over multiculturalism/interculturalism resides in the logic of the necessary requirements for managing a society that recognises itself as diverse. The great multicultural debates of the late twentieth century, and even the early twenty-first century, followed a cultural rights-based approach to diversity. They were centred on questions such as the rights of cultural recognition in the public sphere and how to reassess equality and cultural rights of non-national citizens with different languages, religions, and cultural practices. This approach characterised multicultural citizenship studies until the emergence of a new paradigm that is taking shape in this second decade of the twenty-first century: intercultural citizenship.


Author(s):  
Hannah Schwadron

This chapter covers the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century shift toward a new brand of postassimilatory and postfeminist joke-work. It highlights select material by celebrity Jewish female comics from the 1990s though the present. An “appropriative license” of select comic material conjoins the reappropriative and misappropriative effects of women performing Jewishly in a zeitgeist of American comedy. Self-ironizing performances by Sandra Bernhard, Sarah Silverman, and Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer illustrate how comics slide among race, gender, and sex identities to play up their progressive politics and white guilt in an era of newfound access to mainstream comedy.


2019 ◽  
pp. 275-278
Author(s):  
Emma Cole

Postdramatic receptions of ancient tragedy represent a growing trend in contemporary theatre. This conclusion draws together the three core styles of postdramatic theatre considered in Postdramatic Tragedies, and considers future directions surrounding the combination of ancient tragedy and postdramatic theatre. The chapter reaffirms the significance of the political to postdramatic classical receptions. It claims that postdramatic tragedies have pushed both the tragic genre and the postdramatic style in new directions, and that an appreciation of them is key to understanding the history of theatre and of tragedy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.


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