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Semiotics at the Circus 1st Edition by Paul Bouissac ISBN 3110218305 978-3110218305

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Semiotics at the Circus Paul Bouissac Digital Instant Download

Author(s): Paul Bouissac
ISBN(s): 9783110218299, 3110218291
Edition: None
File Details: PDF, 1.10 MB
Year: 2010
Language: english
SKU: EB-1943798 Category: Tag:

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ISBN 10:  3110218305 

ISBN 13: 978-3110218305

Author: Paul Bouissac 

Semiotics is long on theoretical, often obscure discourses, but short on applications that demonstrate with clarity the applicability of its methods. This book confronts a challenging object, the circus, and endeavors to describe its performances in ways that explain how circus acts produce meaning and cause a deep emotional involvement for their audiences. The approach is not top-down, such as would be a method that would dogmatically apply a particular theory to fully explain the phenomena in terms of this theory alone. Epistemologically, this book is an example of the bottom-up strategy, which consists of considering first the objects and heuristically calling upon methodological resources in a broad theoretical array to come to grips with the problems that are encountered. Any circus act is a complex event that has cognitive and emotional dimensions. It is also a part of a history and an institution, and cannot be abstracted from its cultural and sociological contexts. Thus the range of relevant theoretical and methodological approaches must include structural semiotics, biosemiotics, pragmatics, socio-semiotics, cultural anthropology, the cognitive sciences, the psychology and sociology of emotions, to name only the most important. But the ultimate focus of this book is to enable the readers to better understand the meaning of circus performances and to appreciate the skills and creativity of this traditional popular art, which constantly renews itself from generation to generation.

 

Table of contents: 

Chapter 1. The production of circus space

1.1. The constraints of nomadic life

1.2. The spatial algorithm of the circus

1.3. Squaring the circle

1.4. Olli and Illi: playing with space and desire

Chapter 2. The time of the circus. Cognitive and emotional dimensions of acrobatics and other circus acts

2.1. Circus acts as texts

2.2. A brain to brain affair

2.3. Another kind of time

2.4. The timeless tools of time

2.5. Clowns at work: the melodic structure of social interactions

2.6. Concluding remarks: circus time and cognition

Chapter 3. In what sense is a circus animal performing?

3.1. Meaning, text, and context

3.2. The civilized animal

3.3. A symphony of signs: the art of deceit and the pitfalls of self-deception

Chapter 4. Horses’ feathers: from tacit knowledge to circus metaphors

4.1. A theoretical prelude

4.2. Birds, horses, and feathers

4.3. Horses, ostriches, and chorus girls

4.4. Circus horses in times of cultural changes

Chapter 5. Circus and cycles

5.1. Horse and bicycle: preliminary analogies

5.2. History, cultural evolution, and the circus

5.3. The introduction of the bicycle in circus spectacles

5.4. Pondering the strange history of the bicycle

5.5. The semiotics of the bicycle

5.6. The bicycle enters the kingdom of the horse

Chapter 6. The pyramid and the wheel: the visual discourse of circus acrobatics

6.1. The representation of law and anarchy

6.2. The language of the pyramid

6.3. The Tangier troupe: from order to chaos and back

6.4. The staging of acrobatics as social metaphors

6.5. Revolution(s) on a trampoline

6.6. Triumph and tragedy: the semiotics of fear and danger

6.7. Under the semiotic magnifying lens

6.8. Gender economy and tacit rules: norms and transgressions in the air

6.9. The predictive power of semiotics

6.10. Order and chaos on wheels

Chapter 7. The logic of clown faces

7.1. The structure of European clowns’ make-up

7.2. From structuralism to biosemiotics

7.3. Icons of biomorphology

7.4. White faces and white patches: the management of leucosignals in clown make-up

7.5. A cross-cultural probe of clown make-up and its transformations

7.6. Expanding the scope: toward a global semiotic theory of clown make-up

Chapter 8. Incident, accident, failure: life and death at the circus

8.1. The representation of negative experience in performance

8.2. A science of the individual

8.3. Toward a model of negative experience

8.4. When failure means success: the staging of a negative experience

8.5. The semiotic dissection of George Carl’s comic act

8.6. Anatomy of a negative masterpiece

8.7. Subjective vs. objective situations

8.8. A lady in danger

Chapter 9. There’s no business like show business: the marketing of performance

9.1. Marketing the performing arts

9.2. The golden rules of performance

9.3. How to capture an audience

9.4. The power of stories

Chapter 10. The researcher as spectator: the pragmatics of circus performances

10.1. Toward a theory of live performances

10.2. The predicaments of description

10.3. The rules of performance

10.4. How to make a verbal copy

10.5. From rules of performance to rules of description

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Tags: Paul Bouissac, the Circus