Jake Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780252043925
- eISBN:
- 9780252052859
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043925.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter is an ethnographic study of belief and musical theater in Branson, Missouri, an evangelical Christian resort town set in the Ozarks. A production of the original musical Samson at Sight ...
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This chapter is an ethnographic study of belief and musical theater in Branson, Missouri, an evangelical Christian resort town set in the Ozarks. A production of the original musical Samson at Sight & Sound Theatres reveals the tensions between history and Biblical mythology and suggests Christians come to Branson to experience through musical theater a release from this cognitive dissonance. Drawing upon writings by Christian thinkers C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton, this chapter shows how theater can often register as a space of willful deception--a prosocial lie--whereby belief in the otherworldly and religious can be accessed. Musicals grant theatergoers the paradoxically unreal means of renegotiating Biblical truth in their modern lives.Less
This chapter is an ethnographic study of belief and musical theater in Branson, Missouri, an evangelical Christian resort town set in the Ozarks. A production of the original musical Samson at Sight & Sound Theatres reveals the tensions between history and Biblical mythology and suggests Christians come to Branson to experience through musical theater a release from this cognitive dissonance. Drawing upon writings by Christian thinkers C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton, this chapter shows how theater can often register as a space of willful deception--a prosocial lie--whereby belief in the otherworldly and religious can be accessed. Musicals grant theatergoers the paradoxically unreal means of renegotiating Biblical truth in their modern lives.
Inez Van Der Spek
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780853238140
- eISBN:
- 9781781380444
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Discontinued
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853238140.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In James Tiptree Jr's ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’, a story about alien encounter, the main protagonist, Dr Aaron Kaye, senses that his sister and the alien are in some way ‘in league’ with one ...
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In James Tiptree Jr's ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’, a story about alien encounter, the main protagonist, Dr Aaron Kaye, senses that his sister and the alien are in some way ‘in league’ with one another. The story's posthuman setting accommodates a choric fantasy, an ambivalent fantasy of a union with the mother that is desirable but also terrifying. This chapter examines the collapse of the patriarchal-phallic order and the emergence of the maternally connoted alien in ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’. It shows that the alien in the story points not only to the maternal but also to the divine. The chapter turns to the Bible as well as to Julia Kristeva's views on the so-called archaic mother to gain insight into particular fantasies that appear in the story, focusing on the Wirkungsgeschichte of biblical mythology. Finally, it discusses Kristeva's theory of abjection, and how it relates to the history of Judaism and Christianity.Less
In James Tiptree Jr's ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’, a story about alien encounter, the main protagonist, Dr Aaron Kaye, senses that his sister and the alien are in some way ‘in league’ with one another. The story's posthuman setting accommodates a choric fantasy, an ambivalent fantasy of a union with the mother that is desirable but also terrifying. This chapter examines the collapse of the patriarchal-phallic order and the emergence of the maternally connoted alien in ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’. It shows that the alien in the story points not only to the maternal but also to the divine. The chapter turns to the Bible as well as to Julia Kristeva's views on the so-called archaic mother to gain insight into particular fantasies that appear in the story, focusing on the Wirkungsgeschichte of biblical mythology. Finally, it discusses Kristeva's theory of abjection, and how it relates to the history of Judaism and Christianity.
