Writing And The Body In Motion

Based upon the author's lifetime practices as a dancer, poet and teacher, this innovative approach to developing body awareness focuses on achieving self-discovery and well-being through movement, mindfulness and writing. Written from a holistic (rather than dualistic) view of the mind-body duality, discussion and exercises draw on dance, psychology, neuroscience and meditation to guide personal exploration and creative expression.

Kenneth King is one of America’s most inventive postmodern choreographers. His dancing has always reflected his interest in language and technology, combining movement with film, machines, lighting and words both spoken and written. King is also conversant in philosophy, and some of his most influential dances have been dedicated to and in dialogue with the work of such philosophers as Susanne K. Langer, Edmund Husserl and Friedrich Nietzsche. Since the 1960s, he has performed his dance to texts both spoken and prerecorded—texts intended to stand separately as literary works. Writing in Motion spans more than thirty years and is collected here for the first time. It includes essays, performance scripts of King’s own work, art criticism, philosophy and cultural commentary. Dense with movement, these writings explode and reconfigure the familiar, crack syntax open, and invent startling new words. Dancing, to King, is “writing in space," and writing is a dance of ideas. Whether referencing Aristotle, Langer, Simone de Beauvoir, MTV, Maurice Blanchot or Marshall McLuhan, King’s delightfully lavish prose is very much “in motion.”

Sport literature is never just about sport. The genre’s potential to explore the human condition, including aspects of violence, gender, and the body, has sparked the interest of writers, readers, and scholars. Over the last decade, a proliferation of sport literature courses across the continent is evidence of the sophisticated and evolving body of work developing in this area. Writing the Body in Motion offers introductory essays on the most commonly taught Canadian sport literature texts. The contributions sketch the state of current scholarship, highlight recurring themes and patterns, and offer close readings of key works. Organized chronologically by source text, ranging from Shoeless Joe (1982) to Indian Horse (2012), the essays offer a variety of ways to read, consider, teach, and write about sport literature.

In Lionel Shriver’s entertaining send-up of today’s cult of exercise—which not only encourages better health, but now like all religions also seems to promise meaning, social superiority, and eternal life—an aging husband’s sudden obsession with extreme sport makes him unbearable. After an ignominious early retirement, Remington announces to his wife Serenata that he’s decided to run a marathon. This from a sedentary man in his sixties who’s never done a lick of exercise in his life. His wife can’t help but observe that his ambition is “hopelessly trite.” A loner, Serenata disdains mass group activities of any sort. Besides, his timing is cruel. Serenata has long been the couple’s exercise freak, but by age sixty, her private fitness regimes have destroyed her knees, and she’ll soon face debilitating surgery. Yes, becoming more active would be good for Remington’s heart, but then why not just go for a walk? Without several thousand of your closest friends? As Remington joins the cult of fitness that increasingly consumes the Western world, her once-modest husband burgeons into an unbearable narcissist. Ignoring all his other obligations, he engages a saucy, sexy personal trainer named Bambi, who treats Serenata with contempt. When Remington sets his sights on the legendarily grueling triathlon, MettleMan, Serenata is sure he’ll end up injured or dead. And even if he does survive, their marriage may not. The Motion of the Body Through Space is vintage Lionel Shriver written with psychological insight, a rich cast of characters, lots of verve and petulance, an astute reading of contemporary culture, and an emotionally resonant ending.

An anatomical exploration of the human body, accessibly written with 162 full-color illustrations for physical therapists, dancers, yoga teachers, and students This comprehensive guide demonstrates the functions and evolution of specific body systems, explaining how they cooperate to form an upright, intelligent, tool-making marvel, capable of great technological and artistic achievement. Enhanced with 162 beautifully rendered full-color illustrations, the book opens with an introduction to the origins of movement and a journey through time and evolution—from fish to amphibian, quadruped to primate—showing how humans became the preeminent moving beings on the planet. Further examining our upright support system, the book describes the purpose of: • The extensors, flexors, and spine • The importance of the shoulder girdle as a support structure for the arm • The hands and upper limbs • The pelvic girdle • The feet and lower limbs • Breathing • The larynx and throat musculature • The spiral musculature of the trunk It is our upright posture that makes it possible for us to move in an infinite variety of ways, to manipulate objects, to form speech, and to perform the complex rotational movements that underlie many of our most sophisticated skills. These systems, Dimon argues persuasively, have helped us build, invent, create art, explore the world, and imbue life with a contemplative, spiritual dimension that would otherwise not exist.

Masterful essays that illuminate not only how we die but also how we live. Thomas Lynch, poet, funeral director, and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, continues to examine the relations between the "literary and mortuary arts." "Lynch engages the reader with a mixture of poetic and funerary elements....his voice is rich and generous."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times "[W]hat makes him such a fine essayist is that it's just the business of everyday life and death to him."—Los Angeles Times Book Review "Few readers will walk away from this volume less than stunned and grateful."—Jay Parini, author of Benjamin's Crossing "A luminous work of words."—Nicholas Delbanco, author of What Remains

Sport literature is never just about sport. The genre's potential to explore the human condition, including aspects of violence, gender, and the body, has sparked the interest of writers, readers, and scholars. Over the last decade, a proliferation of sport literature courses across the continent is evidence of the sophisticated and evolving body of work developing in this area. Writing the Body in Motion offers introductory essays on the most commonly taught Canadian sport literature texts. The contributions sketch the state of current scholarship, highlight recurring themes and patterns, and offer close readings of key works. Organized chronologically by source text, ranging from Shoeless Joe (1982) to Indian Horse (2012), the essays offer a variety of ways to read, consider, teach, and write about sport literature. With contributions by Jason Blake, Laura K. Davis, Cara Hedley, Paul Martin, Fred Mason, Sam McKegney, Gyllian Phillips, Trevor J. Phillips, and Cory Willard.

Art historians, biographers, and other researchers have long drawn on Van Gogh’s voluminous correspondence—more than eight hundred letters—for insights into both his personal struggles and his art. But the letters, while often admired for their literary quality, have rarely been approached as literature. In this volume, Patrick Grant sets out to explore the question, “By what criteria do we judge Van Gogh's letters to be, specifically, literary?” Drawing, especially, on Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualization of self-awareness as an ongoing dialogue between “self” and “other,” Grant examines the ways in which Van Gogh’s letters raise, from within themselves, questions and issues to which they also respond. Their literary quality, he argues, derives in part from this “double-voiced discourse”—from the power of the letters to thematize, through their own internal dialogues, the very structure of self-fashioning itself. Far from merely reproducing the narrative of the artist’s personal progress, “the letters enable readers to recognize how necessary yet open-ended, constrained yet liberating, confined yet unpredictable, are the means by which people seek to shape a place for themselves in the world.” This volume builds on Grant’s earlier analysis of Van Gogh’s correspondence, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study (AU Press, 2014), a study in which he approached the letters from a literary critical standpoint, delving into key patterns of metaphors and concepts. In the present volume, he provides instead a literary theoretical analysis of the letters, one that draws them more fully into the domain of modern literary studies. In his deft and keenly perceptive reading, Grant deconstructs the binaries that surface in both Van Gogh’s writing and painting, discusses the narrative dimensions of the letter-sketches and the recurring themes of fantasy, belief, and self-surrender, and draws attention to Van Gogh’s own understanding of the permeable boundary between words and visual art. Viewing the letters as an integrated body of discourse, “My Own Portrait in Writing” offers a theoretically informed interpretation of Van Gogh’s literary achievement that is, quite literally, without precedent.