- Hardcover: 146 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1st edition edition (30 Oct 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0674669908
- ISBN-13: 978-0674669901
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14.4 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,553,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| |||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Could it be that since the Broadway musical is now safely dead--record ticket sales and Disney extravaganzas notwithstanding--it's finally safe to cast a historical and critical eye on this peculiar American art form? Miller rises to the task with an awe-inspiring exuberance--let's just say that by the time one reaches the end of this 143-page "tour de force", one feels as audience must have back when they were first steamrolled by Ethel Merman as Rose in 1959's "Gypsy" (an epochal performance that Miller here dissects at length). At the heart of this extended essay is the complex relationship between gay men and the Broadway show, which began in many an American basement during the 1950s and 60s, where solitary boys would perform along with their cast albums, and ends with a chorus of aging show queens singing along in a piano bar. Miller explores the creative tension that allowed the musical to both acknowledge and deny its gay audience and shows how the performance of show tunes by a generation of homosexuals became a ritual reenactment of the central dilemmas of gay identity...[This is an] entirely fascinating read.--Tom Beer "Out Magazine "
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Review
D. A. Miller's essay is a poetic, personal, idiosyncratic, erotic, and political reverie on gay men's relationship to the Broadway musical..."Place for Us", with wit and not a little pain, teases out the contradictions of late twentieth-century gay male identity in relation to this 'frankly interruptive, ' 'vulgar' form. Miller is entirely of his text, yet also anthropologically curious about the rituals of gay male culture.--Stacy Wolf "Theatre Journal "
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
As the Times's cultural critic Margo Jefferson says on the back cover, Miller's book is "like a musical score that the genre has yet to catch up with." If you go into a Sondheim show expecting Jerry Herman, you will be disappointed. Miller writes in long, complicated, Proustian sentences: his approach is demanding, sometimes exhausting, but if you do the work, it pays off richly, both intellectually and emotionally.
This book is not designed to be read quickly for information or to confirm existing recieved ideas about gay men. It is a dreamy meditation, a passionate combination of language and sentiment that is designed to be read with love, the same love that gay men so often have for musical theatre. This is not a simple expositional piece, nor does it attempt to be. "Place for Us" requires substantial time and rereading, and when given the attention it deserves, it is enormously rewarding and insightful.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
17 reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Brilliant, passionate, and demanding
3 Nov 1998
Format:Hardcover
As the Times's cultural critic Margo Jefferson says on the back cover, Miller's book is "like a musical score that the genre has yet to catch up with." If you go into a Sondheim show expecting Jerry Herman, you will be disappointed. Miller writes in long, complicated, Proustian sentences: his approach is demanding, sometimes exhausting, but if you do the work, it pays off richly, both intellectually and emotionally.
This book is not designed to be read quickly for information or to confirm existing recieved ideas about gay men. It is a dreamy meditation, a passionate combination of language and sentiment that is designed to be read with love, the same love that gay men so often have for musical theatre. This is not a simple expositional piece, nor does it attempt to be. "Place for Us" requires substantial time and rereading, and when given the attention it deserves, it is enormously rewarding and insightful.
14 of 18 people found the following review helpful
A Scholar of Pleasure
7 Dec 1999
Format:Hardcover
In this volume D.A. Miller, as he did in its brilliant predecessor BRINGING OUT ROLAND BARTHES, does what few other academic writers, born with the moon in Barthes and Foucault rising, have been able to accomplish: he takes the work of these celebrated theorists further both in the name of and toward the understanding of pleasure. Hence his style gets the bad rap that all great gay displays receive, since it is willfully ostentatious, proud of its own capacity to desire, and as complicated in its elaboration as we imagine all of our individual desiring lives (real and fantasized) to be. Moreover, it refuses to testify to the so-called straightforward mode of criticism that blunt populists and people who can't stand gay men (imagine Paglia in both categories) moralistically rant about so tiresomely; instead, it uses language like a scalpel or, better yet, as the integrated musical uses song-and-dance: in only the most highly specificed, uniquely articulated manner required by the task at hand. This work is strange, difficult, tremendously thoughtful and, once a reader has taken the time to savor each of its gorgeous sentences, as satisyfing as a great night at the theater. Let me add that PLACE FOR US doubles as a powerful manifesto in the somewhat uneven tradition of post-Stonewall gay male writers, taking us to a place, for no one else but us, that had been impossible to imagine before we read it.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Witty and daring cultural criticism
28 Sep 1999
Format:Hardcover
Obviously this book is not for everyone! But it is easily the best thing ever written on this subject and if the reviewers below can't deal with the difficulty of the prose (and ideas) that's their loss. They want Miller's "purple prose" to be less lavender, but did they ever think that maybe that's the point? The cult of "straightforwardness" obviously thrives even in the most defensively gay circles.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Gay & Lesbian > Critical Theory
- Books > Gay & Lesbian > History > Gay
- Books > Gay & Lesbian > History > Lesbian
- Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature > Drama > Gay
- Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature > Drama > Lesbian
- Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Music
- Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Performing Arts > Musicals
- Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > Drama > Theatre Studies
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
