Victor Segalen has come to be widely recognized in recent years as one of the luminaries of French modernism. Trained as a surgeon and Chinese interpreter, he wrote prolifically in a variety of genres. With this highly original collection of prose poems in French and Chinese, Segalen invented a new genre-the "stèle-poem"-in imitation of the tall stone tablets with formal inscriptions that he saw in China. His wry persona declaims these inscriptions like an emperor struggling to command his personal empire, drawing from a vast range of Chinese texts to explore themes of friendship, love, desire, gender roles, violence, exoticism, otherness, and selfhood. The result is a linguistically and culturally hybrid modernist poetics that is often ironic and at times haunting. Segalen's bilingual masterwork is presented here fully translated, in the most extensively annotated critical edition ever produced. It includes unpublished manuscript material, newly identified sources, commentaries on the Chinese, and a facsimile of the original edition as printed in Beijing in 1914. Volume 2 of this work is available online at www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/segalen2 and www.steles.org.

A groundbreaking choreographer, lighting designer, composer, and costumer, Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) is recognized as one of the twentieth century's most innovative artists. Incorporating novel technological and performance tactics, he invented a total language of non-literal dance theater that attracted audiences worldwide for over forty years. The Returns of Alwin Nikolais is the first book devoted to a critical analysis of Nikolais's work, and it provides a broad and important overview of his artistic and philosophical trajectory. The volume brings together essays by scholars of dance history, theater studies, music, and art history, and includes primary materials such as reviews, diary excerpts, and photographs. It is a valuable resource for teachers and students of art and culture.Contributors: PHILIP AUSLANDER, HERBERT BLAU, JANA FEINMAN, MARK FRANKO, BOB GILMORE, CLAUDIA GITELMAN, YVONNE HARDT, REBEKAH KOWAL, RANDY MARTIN, NAIMA PREVOTS, AND MARCIA SIEGEL.

One of the most popular and widely performed dance styles in India and around the world, bharata natyam has made the transition from its beginnings in the temples and courts of southern India to a highly respected international phenomenon. In this study of a classical dance form, author Janet O'Shea tracks the choreographic transformations that accompanied the transfer of bharata natyam to the urban concert stage in the 1930s and 1940s. At Home in the World situates these changes within the political debates of their time, and further ties the concerns of this period to present-day practice. The history of this dance is also a history of India itself, and readers can trace various national struggles over gender identity, regionalism, and globalism through O'Shea's narrative. With over 250 teachers in the United States alone, bharata natyam offers a remarkable case study of how a traditional art form moves into the world.

The definitive record of the history, lore, and lost secrets of the Eclectic Society at Wesleyan University from its inception in 1837 through a great period of upheaval in the 1960s. The Society was founded in 1837 at Wesleyan, making it one of the oldest college fraternal organizations in the United States.

How do music and dance reveal the ways in which a community interacts with the world? How are the senses used in communicating cultural knowledge? In Sensational Knowledge, ethnomusicologist and dancer Tomie Hahn uncovers the process and nuances of learning nihon buyo, a traditional Japanese dance form. She uses case studies of dancers at all levels, as well as her own firsthand experiences, to investigate the complex language of bodies, especially across cultural divides. Paying particular attention to the effect of body-to-body transmission, and how culturally constructed processes of transmission influence our sense of self, Hahn argues that the senses facilitate the construction of "boundaries of existence" that define our physical and social worlds. In this flowing and personal text, Hahn reveals the ways in which culture shapes our attendance to various sensoria, and how our interpretation of sensory information shapes our individual realities. An included DVD provides visual examples.

This autobiographical novel depicts the experiences of three girls coming of age in the Nazi concentration camps. Through Tania's eyes, we experience claustrophobic uncertainty, grief, terror, exhaustion, and Tania's sustaining hope, her ability to always see and experience beauty. As in The Diary of Anne Frank, Tania's youthful concerns and observations are interwoven among accounts of extremity: her brother's murder; her mother's decision to stay with her father and die in the gas chamber rather than be transported to another concentration camp; the saving friendships Tania develops; her relationships with young men who are prisoners. Tania's release from Bergen-Belsen and her return to Prague after the liberation is unforgettable and devastating: She observes people wearing normal clothes, eating ice cream, and traveling on buses between work and home. There is no judgment, only the reality of two worlds existing simultaneously. With spare prose, Zdena Berger's first-hand observations convey the deprivation and brutality in which Tania comes of age, and the friendships and hope that help her to survive.

For more than 30 years, the action movie has been the film genre that most represents Hollywood to the world, as action films find blockbuster success at box offices internationally. Still, the genre seldom receives the critical attention it deserves. Studying its trends, key components, and visual excesses, this new and expanded edition of Action Speaks Louder traces the genre's evolution to reveal how it has come to assume its place of prominence in American culture. With scores of in-depth case studies-including films such as Dirty Harry, RoboCop, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Armageddon, Spider-Man, War of the Worlds, and The Incredibles-author Eric Lichtenfeld draws on film analysis, production histories, critical responses, studio marketing materials, and original filmmaker interviews. Up-to-date and comprehensive, Action Speaks Louder is the definitive study of the movies' most kinetic form of fun.

Jules Verne, celebrated French author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days, wrote over 60 novels collected in the popular series "Voyages Extraordinaires." A handful of these have never been translated into English, including Invasion of the Sea, written in 1904 when large-scale canal digging was very much a part of the political, economic, and military strategy of the world's imperial powers.Instead of linking two seas, as existing canals (the Suez and the Panama) did, Verne proposed a canal that would create a sea in the heart of the Sahara Desert. The story raises a host of concerns -- environmental, cultural, and political. The proposed sea threatens the nomadic way of life of those Islamic tribes living on the site, and they declare war. The ensuing struggle is finally resolved only by a cataclysmic natural event. This Wesleyan edition features notes, appendices and an introduction by Verne scholar Arthur B. Evans, as well as reproductions of the illustrations from the original French edition.

Climbing through the recesses of a mine, an English man falls into a deep chasm and finds himself suddenly trapped in a subterranean world inhabited by an ancient race of advanced beings. From Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth to Chris Marker's La Jetée, subterranean worlds have been a source of both fascination and fear for the literary imagination and The Coming Race is no exception. An evolutionary fantasy first published in 1871, the story draws upon ideas of Darwinism to describe a near future world characterized by female dominance, physical perfection, and vast technological progress. The novel was extremely popular in its time and is now considered a seminal science fiction text by contemporary scholars. This Wesleyan edition includes scholarly notes and an introduction that places the work in an intellectual and literary context, and describes the author's interest in the occult.

Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems and includes a new collection, "Door in the Mountain. "Valentine's poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great subjects-love, and death, and the soul. Her images-strange, canny visions of the unknown self-clang with the authenticity of real experience. This is an urgent art that wants to heal what it touches, a poetry that wants to tell, intimately, the whole life.

In the wake of the blockbuster television success of "Dancing with the Stars," competitive ballroom dance has become a subject of new fascination-and renewed scrutiny. Known by its practitioners as DanceSport, ballroom is a significant dance form and a fascinating cultural phenomenon. In this first in-depth study of the sport, dancer and dance historian Juliet McMains explores the "Glamour Machine" that drives the thriving industry, delving into both the pleasures and perils of its seductions. She further explores the broader social issues invoked in American DanceSport: representation of "Latin," economics that often foster inequality, and issues of identity, including gender, race, class, and sexuality. Putting ballroom dance in the larger contexts of culture and history, Glamour Addiction makes an important contribution to dance studies, while giving new and veteran enthusiasts a unique and unprecedented glimpse behind the scenes.

In this exploration of the funk groove and its unique sounds, author Anne Danielsen takes an in-depth look at this under-explored genre. Danielsen concentrates on the golden age of funk in the late 1960s and the 1970s, focusing on two of the era's artists who made a substantial impact on the landscape of popular music: James Brown and George Clinton/Parliament. Aiming to understand funk not only as objectified musical meaning but also as lived experience, she begins with the musical events themselves and draws on her experiences as both a fan and a scholar to capture how their particular organization creates the funk listener's pleasure. Danielsen further examines issues surrounding race in the construction and consumption of this music, focusing her study with how white listeners responded to funk in the 1970s, and arguing that African American music has remained a means of catharsis and of dealing with pleasures of the body. Funk's crossover to international success among listeners of pop and rock music affected both the music itself and audiences' understanding of it. Presence and Pleasure shows us how.

During her twelve years with Ballet Society and the New York City Ballet, Barbara Milberg worked under the direction of George Balanchine. She rose from corps de ballet to soloist, danced leading roles in Swan Lake and Illuminations, and performed in celebrated world premieres. In this observant and poignant memoir, she shares her recollections of Balanchine, his craft and his values, and lends insight into surprising aspects of his personality. Fisher gives readers a rare glimpse inside Balanchine's artistry, including vivid accounts of the makings of such important ballets as Schoenberg's Opus 34, AGON, and the world-famous Nutcracker. Told through the eyes of a young dancer in what seemed a truly magical place and time, In Balanchine's Company is ideal for ballet fans young and old. Rich in anecdote, insight, and humor, it offers a unique perspective on one of the twentieth century's cultural giants.

In his 1898 War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells imagined aliens from Mars descending to Earth with violent intentions. In Star Begotten, first published in 1937, the suspicion arises that the Martians may have returned-this time using cosmic rays to alter human chromosomes. The protagonist Joseph Davis, an author of popular histories, grows fearfully obsessed with rumors of the Martian plan. He considers the possibility that mutation may have already occurred, and that his child, his wife, and even he may already be Martians. An ironic and often comic novel, Star Begotten portrays discoveries in evolutionary biology and contemplates the benefits as well as the horrors of mutation. This new annotated edition situates the novel in its literary and historical contexts, explains its place in Wells's late development, and highlights its importance as a precursor to the dark comedies of delusion by writers like Robert Sheckley and Philip K. Dick.

This new book by award-winning author Amy Newman explores as its formal structure the 72 definitions for the word "fall." These lovely, accessible poems span a narrative drama-from the creation of the world and the subsequent exile of its first inhabitants, through the downward movement of the human body in its surrender to illness and the world's gravitational pull, to the beauty in the descent of spent foliage in autumn. Each definition of "fall" engenders its own poem, and the definitions serve as poem titles. Section one explores the theological sense of The Fall, and section two focuses on the present world, addressing how the blemish of that Fall-real or imagined, religious or cultural-exists in us as homesickness, physical illness, and domestic and spiritual dissolution. The third section attends to the very gesture of defining, of finding ways to name and live in a world where both the landscape and the language are vividly alive yet saturated with memory and loss.

Bryher, adventurer, novelist, publisher flees Victorian Britain for the raucous streets of Cairo and the sultry Parisian cafes. Among the vibrancy of artists and writers in twenties and thirties Paris, London, and beyond, she develops relationships with Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Sylvia Beach, and many others. This compelling memoir reveals Bryher's unconventional childhood, her relationship with her longtime partner H. D., her impact on modernism, and her profound sense of social justice, helping over 100 people escape from the Nazis before fleeing her safe-house on Lake Geneva and returning to H.D. in London.