Bücher von Barbara Newman

In Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred, Barbara Newman offers a new approach to the many ways that sacred and secular interact in medieval literature, arguing that the sacred was the normative, unmarked default category against which the secular always had to define itself and establish its niche. Newman refers to this dialectical relationship as "e;crossover"e;-which is not a genre in itself, but a mode of interaction, an openness to the meeting or even merger of sacred and secular in a wide variety of forms. Newman sketches a few of the principles that shape their interaction: the hermeneutics of "e;both/and,"e; the principle of double judgment, the confluence of pagan material and Christian meaning in Arthurian romance, the rule of convergent idealism in hagiographic romance, and the double-edged sword in parody. Medieval Crossover explores a wealth of case studies in French, English, and Latin texts that concentrate on instances of paradox, collision, and convergence. Newman convincingly and with great clarity demonstrates the widespread applicability of the crossover concept as an analytical tool, examining some very disparate works.

A critic and writer on dance for well over twenty years, Barbara Newman has gone in search of teachers and coaches, directors, choreographers and stagers - former dancers who had turned the focus of their own experience on others - to explain the state of ballet today. Among leaders of the dance world the author interviewed were Suki Schorer, Helgi Tomasson, Mark Morris, Violette Verdy and 14 other artists whose work she knew and respected, most of them active outside of New York and London. Newman is not interested in dance as an aesthetic abstraction, and the people who answered her questions were not speaking theoretically. On the contrary, her speculation and their responses bring an elusive subject down to earth, illuminating a process that reaches back in history and forward to today, though its dreams are of a world no one can imagine.