Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Humanities — Language & Literature — Romance

A leading scholar of semiotics and circus studies, Bouissac (emer., Univ. of Toronto) contributes another erudite and poetic volume to the literature on the circus. As he did in previous works, including Circus and Culture (CH, May'77) and Semiotics at the Circus (2010), Bouissac provides critical insights and reflections on how circus creates meaning and mines memories for the spectator. In his prologue Bouissac terms this volume "not a detached, clinical account of circus artists but a ... self-involving exercise amounting to a confession ... a kind of auto-ethnography" that will take readers "behind the veil of the representations they admire (or despise)." The author's accounts fieldwork and excursions reveal the variety of circus, and his enthusiasm and passion for the form emerge on every page, as his analyses of circus beckon the reader to explore the form to its limits. Along with erudite, lyrical investigations and considerations, the volume features a multitude of images (sadly, in black and white) from such performers and organizations as Sandy Sun, Circus Voyage, The Regio, and Gaston Hani. Like Bouissac's previous books, this is an indispensable volume that not only adds to the scholarship on the form but also points toward new methods for studying this one-of-a-kind performance genre.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.