A01=Rae Beth Gordon
african
African Dance
american
Author_Rae Beth Gordon
Belly Dance
black
Black American Dance
Blond Venus
cancan
Cancan Dancer
casino
Casino De Paris
Category=NHD
dancers
degeneration theory
Edmond De Goncourt
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
evolution and popular entertainment France
evolutionary aesthetics
Exposition Universelle
fin de siA?cle culture
Henri III
Hottentot Venus
Hysterical Chorea
Idiot Comic
La Goulue
La Revue Blanche
medical anthropology
Missing Link
nervous
Nervous Pathology
Olympia Music Hall
paris
pathology
performance studies
Pithecanthropus Erectus
Popular Spectacle
primitivism in art
Revue Philosophique De La France
rire
Tourette
Ubu Roi
Unconscious Imitation
Wild Men
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780754652434
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Dec 2008
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Examining the extraordinary influence of Darwin's theory of evolution on French thought from 1875 to 1910, Rae Beth Gordon argues for a reconsideration of modernism both in time and in place that situates its beginnings in the French café-concert aesthetic. Gordon weaves the history of medical science, ethnology, and popular culture into a groundbreaking exploration of the cultural implications of gesture in dance performances at late-nineteenth-century Parisian café-concerts and music halls. While art historians have studied the ties between primitivism and modernism, their convergence in fin-de-siècle popular entertainment has been largely overlooked. Gordon argues that while the impact of Darwinism was unprecedented in science, it was no less present in popular culture through the popular press and popular entertainment, where it constituted a kind of "evolutionist aesthetic" on display in the café-concert, circus, and music-hall as well as in the spectator's reception of the representations on the stage. Modernity in these sites, Gordon contends, was composed by the convergence of contemporary medical theory with representations of the primitive, staged in entertainments that ranged from the can-can, Missing Links, and epileptic singers to the Cake-Walk. Her anthropology of gesture uncovers in these dislocations of the human form an aesthetic of disorder a half century before the eruptions of Dada and Surrealism.
Rae Beth Gordon is Professor emerita of French Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Author of numerous essays on 19th-century medicine, literature, and aesthetics, she has written Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (1992) and Why the French love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early French Cinema (2001).
