Daniel Fischlin

Ajay Heble

A fascinating journey into the world of rebel musicians, where music and politics unite.

Human Rights, Resistant Sounds, and the Politics of Music Making

Rebel Musics

An imaginative and passionate synthesis of form and function, Landing on the Wrong NOte goes beyond mainstream jazz criticism, outlining a new poetics of jazz that emerges not from the ivory tower but from the clubs, performances, and lives of today's jazz musicians.

Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice

Landing on the Wrong Note

George Lipsitz

The Fierce Urgency of Now offers an impassioned call to take the practices of musical improvisation often associated with jazz performance as a model for social-justice activism.

Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation

The Fierce Urgency of Now

Rebecca Caines

Improvisation is a performance practice that animates and activates diverse energies of inspiration, critique, and invention. In recent years it has coalesced into an exciting and innovative new field of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, becoming a cornerstone of both practical and theoretical approaches to performance. The Improvisation Studies Reader draws together the works of key artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines, including theatre, music, literature, film, and dance. Divided by keywords into eight sections, this book bridges the gaps between these fields. The book includes case studies, exercises, graphic scores and poems in order to produce a teaching and research resource that identifies central themes in improvisation studies. The sections include: Listening Trust/Risk Flow Dissonance Responsibility Liveness Surprise Hope Each section of the Reader is introduced by a newly commissioned think piece by a key figure in the field, which opens up research questions reflecting on the keyword in question. By placing key theoretical and classic texts in conversation with cutting-edge research and artists’ statements, this book answers the urgent questions facing improvising artists and theorists in the mediatized Twenty-First Century.

Spontaneous Acts

The Improvisation Studies Reader

Donna Palmateer Pennee

J.R. Struthers

Times change, lives change, and the terms we need to describe our literature or society or condition—what Raymond Williams calls “keywords”—change with them. Perhaps the most significant development in the quarter-century since Eli Mandel edited his anthology Contexts of Canadian Criticism has been the growing recognition that not only do different people need different terms, but the same terms have different meanings for different people and in different contexts. Nation, history, culture, art, identity—the positions we take discussing these and other issues can lead to conflict, but also hold the promise of a new sort of community. Speaking of First Nations people and their literature, Beth Brant observes that “Our connections … are like the threads of a weaving. … While the colour and beauty of each thread is unique and important, together they make a communal material of strength and durability.” New Contexts of Canadian Criticism is designed to be read, to work, in much the same manner.

New Contexts of Canadian Criticism

Much of the critical writing on the fiction of Alice Munro has explored and emphasized Munro's 'realism'. But her stories frequently turn on what has been left out; they are rife with unsent (unfinished) letters, with things people mean to, but do not, say or tell. Ajay Heble's study focuses on Munro's involvement with a 'discourse of absence' and suggests that our understanding of these texts often depends not only on what happens in the fiction, but also on what might have happened. Munro's stories confer their meaning not simply by referring to an outer reality, but also by bestowing upon the reader a stimulating wealth of possibilities taken from what we might call a potential or absent level of meaning. Characteristically, they articulate an unresolvable tension between variants on these positions: between, on the one hand, her delineation of a surface reality -- a world 'out there' which we are invited to recognize as real and true -- and, on the other, her involvement with a discourse of absence that challenges the very conventions within which her fiction operates. Drawing on structuralist and post-structuralist theories of language and its relation to meaning, knowledge, and systems of power, and on theories of postmodernist fiction, Heble offers both a careful reading of Munro's stories and a theoretical framework for reading meanings in absence. His book extends recent revisionist analysis and makes a valuable and original contribution to the criticism on Munro.

Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence

The Tumble of Reason

Cover -- Copyright page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Classroom Action - Human Rights, Critical Activism, and Community-Based Education -- 1 Access Interventions: Experiments in Critical Community Engagement -- 2 The Guelph Speaks! Anthology: Storytelling as Praxis in Community-Facing Pedagogy -- 3 In Action / Inaction: Political Theatre, Social Change, and Challenging Privilege -- 4 Is This Project "Skin Deep"? Looking Back at a Community-Facing Photo-Art Initiative -- 5 Reflections on Dialogic Theatre for Social Change: Co-creation of The Other End of the Line -- Coda: Sign Up Here -- Webography: Human Rights Education: Resources for Research and Teaching -- Works Cited -- Contributors -- Index

Human Rights, Critical Activism, and Community-Based Education

Classroom Action

Rob Wallace

Jazz musicians, scholars, and journalists emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and 1970s has continued to animate the avant-garde, Free Jazz, fusion, and other forms of this lively, always-evolving music.

Ajay Heble

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