Circus as Multimodal Discourse(English, Hardcover, Bouissac Paul Professor Emeritus)

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Circus as Multimodal Discourse(English, Hardcover, Bouissac Paul Professor Emeritus) is written by Bouissac Paul Professor Emeritus and published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1441125639 (ISBN 10) and 9781441125637 (ISBN 13).

Now available in paperback, this volume presents a theory of the circus as a secular ritual and introduces a method to analyze its performances as multimodal discourse. The book's fifteen chapters cover the range of circus specialties (magic, domestic and wild animal training, acrobatics, and clowning) and provide examples to show how cultural meaning is produced, extended and amplified by circus performances. Bouissac is one of the world's leading authorities on circus ethnography and semiotics and this work is grounded on research conducted over a 50 year span in Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas. It concludes with a reflection on the potentially subversive power of this discourse and its contemporary use by activists. Throughout, it endeavours to develop an analytical approach that is mindful of the epistemological traps of both positivism and postmodernist license. It brings semiotics and ethnography to bear on the realm of the circus.