Author: Greil Marcus File Type: epub Unlike all previous versions of rock n roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points that everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008, then proceeds to dramatize how each embodies rock n roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts outa new language, something new under the sun. Transmission by Joy Division. All I Could Do Was Cry by Etta James and then Beyonce. To Know Him Is to Love Him, first by the Teddy Bears and almost half a century later by Amy Winehouse. In Marcuss hands these and other songs tell the story of the music, which is, at bottom, the story of the desire for freedom in all its unruly and liberating glory. Slipping the constraints of chronology, Marcus braids together past and present, holding up to the light the ways that these striking songs fall through time and circumstance, gaining momentum and meaning, astonishing us by upending our presumptions and prejudices. This book, by a founder of contemporary rock criticismand its most gifted and incisive practitioneris destined to become an enduring classic. **

Author: Matthew Bryan Gillis File Type: pdf Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire recounts the history of an exceptional ninth-century religious outlaw, Gottschalk of Orbais. Frankish Christianity required obedience to ecclesiastical superiors, voluntary participation in reform, and the belief that salvation was possible for all baptized believers. Yet Gottschalk-a mere priest-developed a controversial, Augustinian-based theology of predestination, claiming that only divine election through grace enabled eternal life. Gottschalk preached to Christians within the Frankish empire-including bishops-and non-Christians beyond its borders, scandalously demanding they confess his doctrine or be revealed as wicked reprobates. Even after his condemnations for heresy in the late 840s, Gottschalk continued his activities from prison thanks to monks who smuggled his pamphlets to a subterranean community of supporters. This study reconstructs the career of the Carolingian Empires foremost religious dissenter in order to imagine that empire from the perspective of someone who worked to subvert its most fundamental beliefs. Examining the surviving evidence (including his own writings), Matthew Gillis analyzes Gottschalks literary and spiritual self-representations, his modes of argument, his prophetic claims to martyrdom and miraculous powers, and his shocking defiance to bishops as strategies for influencing contemporaries in changing political circumstances. In the larger history of medieval heresy and dissent, Gottschalks case reveals how the Carolingian Empire preserved order within the church through coercive reform. The hierarchy compelled Christians to accept correction of perceived sins and errors, while punishing as sources of spiritual corruption those rare dissenters who resisted its authority. **

Author: Myla Goldberg File Type: epub Amazon.com ReviewIn Myla Goldbergs outstanding first novel, a family is shaken apart by a small but unexpected shift in the prospects of one of its members. When 9-year-old Eliza Naumann, an otherwise indifferent student, takes first prize in her school spelling bee, it is as if rays of light have begun to emanate from her head. Teachers regard her with a new fondness the studious girls begin to save a place for her at lunch. Even Eliza can sense herself changing. She had often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see. Elizas father, Saul, a scholar and cantor, had long since given up expecting sparks of brilliance on her part. While her brother, Aaron, had taken pride in reciting his Bar Mitzvah prayers from memory, she had typically preferred television reruns to homework or reading. This belated evidence of a miraculous talent encourages Saul to reassess his daughter. And after she wins the statewide bee, he begins tutoring her for the national competition, devoting to Eliza the hours he once spent with Aaron. His daughter flowers under his care, eventually coming to look at life in alphabetical terms. Consonants are the camels of language, she realizes, proudly carrying their lingual loads. blockquoteVowels, however, are a different species, the fish that flash and glisten in the watery depths. Vowels are elastic and inconstant, fickle and unfaithful.... Before the bee, Eliza had been a consonant, slow and unsurprising. With her bee success, she has entered vowelhood. blockquoteWhen Saul sees the state of transcendence that she effortlessly achieves in competition, he encourages his daughter to explore the mystical states that have eluded him--the influx of God-knowledge (_shefa_) described by the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia. Although Saul has little idea what he has set in motion, even the sound of Abulafias name sets off music in her head. A-bu-la-fi-a. Its magic, the open sesame that unblocked the path to her father and then to language itself. Meanwhile, stunned by his fathers defection, Aaron begins a troubling religious quest. Elizas brainy, compulsive mother is also unmoored by her success. The spelling champions newfound gift for concentration reminds Miriam of herself as a girl, and she feels a pang for not having seen her daughter more clearly before. But Elizas clumsy response to Miriams overtures convinces her mother that she has no real ties to her daughter. This final disappointment precipitates her departure into a stunning secret life. The reader is left wondering what would have happened if the Naumanns spiritual thirsts had not been set in restless motion. A poignant and exceptionally well crafted tale, Bee Season has a slow beginning but a tour-de-force conclusion. --Regina MarlerFrom Publishers WeeklyAn eccentric family falls apart at the seams in an absorbing debut that finds congruencies between the elementary school spelling-bee circuit, Jewish mysticism, Eastern religious cults and compulsive behavior. Nine-year-old Eliza Naumann feels like the dullest resident of a house full of intellectuals--her older brother, Aaron, is an overachiever her mother, Miriam, is a lawyer and her father, Saul, is a self-taught scholar and a cantor at the community synagogue. She surprises herself and the rest of the Naumanns when she discovers a rare aptitude for spelling, winning her school and district bees with a surreal surge of mystical insight, in which letters seem to take on a life of their own. Saul shifts his focus from Aaron to Eliza, devoting his afternoons to their practice sessions, while neglected Aaron joins the Hare Krishnas. Seduced by his own inner longings, Saul sees in Eliza the potential to fulfill the teachings of the Kabbalah scholar Abulafia, who taught that enlightenment could be reached through strategic alignments of letters and words. Eliza takes to this new discipline with a desperate, single-minded focus. At the same time, her brilliant but removed mother succumbs to a longtime secret vice and begins a descent into madness. Goldbergs insights into religious devotion, guilt, love, obsessive personalities and family dynamics ring true, and her use of spelling-as-metaphor makes a clever trope in a novel populated by literate scholars and voracious readers. Her quiet wit, balanced by an empathetic understanding of human foibles, animates every page. Although she has a tendency to overexplain, Goldbergs attentive ear makes accounts of fast-paced spelling competitions or descriptions of Miriams struggles to resist her own compulsions riveting, and her unerring knack for telling details (as when Eliza twitches through a spelling bee in itchy tights) captures a childs perceptions with touching acuity. While coming-of-age stories all bear a certain similarity, Goldberg strikes new ground here, and displays a fresh, distinctive and totally winning voice. (June) 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: Kate Flaherty File Type: pdf Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Centre showcases a wide array of recent, innovative and original research into Shakespeare and learning in Australasia, in secondary, tertiary and adult education. Premised on the dissolution of the centrecolony binary that for so long structured the reception and teaching of Shakespeare in the colonies, the book explores the use of local knowledge and experience to invigorate and renew learning. In elevating the value of the local, the book provides models of educational theory and practice that are transferable and adaptable. The editors have drawn on contributors with diverse areas of expertise including dramatic practitioners, historicist scholars, school teachers and academics who train teachers, and literary scholars with an interest in new theoretical and practical approaches to pedagogy.**