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Informationen zum Autor Paul Bouissac is Professor Emeritus at Victoria College, University of Toronto, Canada. He is a world renowned figure in semiotics and a pioneer of circus studies. He runs runs the Semioticon [ https://smartsemiotics.com ], an Open Semiotics Resource Center, which has a global readership. Zusammenfassung A Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019 This book documents and discusses the meaning(s) of the creative process at play in the crafting and staging of circus acts. It highlights the experience of circus artists as their skills develop and mature into public performances that create aesthetic and emotional values in the modern economy of live spectacles. It scrutinizes the meaning that circus acts produce for the spectators and for the artists themselves who live this process from the inside. This is a book for those studying semiotics and wanting to see it applied to a real life milieu in accessible and passionate prose. The Meaning of the Circus is grounded on the personal experience of Professor Paul Bouissac as both a circus entrepreneur and a researcher with decades of primary material on the significance of past and contemporary circus acts. It is based on substantial accounts provided by many men and women who have agreed to share the challenges, joys, and anxieties of their life as artists. Personal and rigorous, it contributes to the hermeneutics of the circus arts by adding existential depth to the production and reception of their performances. Inhaltsverzeichnis List of FiguresPrefaceAcknowledgements1. Like moths flying to a candle in the night2. Ritual and sacrifice: the circus between cult and art3. The Music is the Message4. Flashback5. Great expectations6. The Ethnography of Memory7. A Sense of Gravity8. To laugh or not to laugh9. Lives under siege10. Where is home? The circus’s endless OdysseyBibliographyIndex
