Florian Freitag – författare

New Orleans is unique – which is precisely why there are many Crescent Cities all over the world: for almost 150 years, writers, artists, cultural brokers, and entrepreneurs have drawn on and simultaneously contributed to New Orleans’s fame and popularity by recreating the city in popular media from literature, photographs, and plays to movies, television shows, and theme parks. Addressing students and fans of the city and of popular culture, Popular New Orleans examines three pivotal moments in the history of New Orleans in popular media: the creation of the popular image of the Crescent City during the late nineteenth century in the local-color writings published in Scribner’s Monthly/Century Magazine; the translation of this image into three-dimensional immersive spaces during the twentieth century in Disney’s theme parks and resorts in California, Florida, and Japan; and the radical transformation of this image following Hurricane Katrina in public performances such as Mardi Gras parades and operas. Covering visions of the Crescent City from George W. Cable’s Old Creole Days stories (1873-1876) to Disneyland’s "New Orleans Square" (1966) to Rosalyn Story’s opera Wading Home (2015), Popular New Orleans traces how popular images of New Orleans have changed from exceptional to exemplary.

New Orleans is unique – which is precisely why there are many Crescent Cities all over the world: for almost 150 years, writers, artists, cultural brokers, and entrepreneurs have drawn on and simultaneously contributed to New Orleans’s fame and popularity by recreating the city in popular media from literature, photographs, and plays to movies, television shows, and theme parks. Addressing students and fans of the city and of popular culture, Popular New Orleans examines three pivotal moments in the history of New Orleans in popular media: the creation of the popular image of the Crescent City during the late nineteenth century in the local-color writings published in Scribner’s Monthly/Century Magazine; the translation of this image into three-dimensional immersive spaces during the twentieth century in Disney’s theme parks and resorts in California, Florida, and Japan; and the radical transformation of this image following Hurricane Katrina in public performances such as Mardi Gras parades and operas. Covering visions of the Crescent City from George W. Cable’s Old Creole Days stories (1873-1876) to Disneyland’s "New Orleans Square" (1966) to Rosalyn Story’s opera Wading Home (2015), Popular New Orleans traces how popular images of New Orleans have changed from exceptional to exemplary.

This book examines the intersections of silence with immersive arts and experiences. Silence and immersion may seem antithetical: while immersion is supposedly induced by acoustic and other stimuli, silence is commonly understood as the absence or opposite of sound. Since the eighteenth century, however, silence has been established as a multifarious and polyvalent cultural concept. Immersion, in turn, though often used as a simple "all-inclusive" term, has old and complex ontological and epistemological roots.

Organized into three parts, this book brings critical, historical, and theoretical debates on silence into dialogue with different notions of immersion. The 16 theoretical articles and case studies engage in discovering and questioning the continued prominence of both concepts in aesthetics, culture, and media. Covering music, film, digital, visual and performance art, theater, video games, and theme parks, the chapters discuss both highly canonical and rarely examined artifacts. Written by scholars from Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland, the interdisciplinary collection includes perspectives from musicology, film studies, cultural and media studies, gender studies, art history, and philosophy.

Silence, Sounds, Music addresses both an academic and a wider audience. It will be of interest to anyone interested in music, sound, immersive experiences, the so-called experience economy, and contemporary art and culture.

This book examines the intersections of silence with immersive arts and experiences. Silence and immersion may seem antithetical: while immersion is supposedly induced by acoustic and other stimuli, silence is commonly understood as the absence or opposite of sound. Since the eighteenth century, however, silence has been established as a multifarious and polyvalent cultural concept. Immersion, in turn, though often used as a simple "all-inclusive" term, has old and complex ontological and epistemological roots.

Organized into three parts, this book brings critical, historical, and theoretical debates on silence into dialogue with different notions of immersion. The 16 theoretical articles and case studies engage in discovering and questioning the continued prominence of both concepts in aesthetics, culture, and media. Covering music, film, digital, visual and performance art, theater, video games, and theme parks, the chapters discuss both highly canonical and rarely examined artifacts. Written by scholars from Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland, the interdisciplinary collection includes perspectives from musicology, film studies, cultural and media studies, gender studies, art history, and philosophy.

Silence, Sounds, Music addresses both an academic and a wider audience. It will be of interest to anyone interested in music, sound, immersive experiences, the so-called experience economy, and contemporary art and culture.

This book offers a comprehensive, multidisciplinary introduction to theme parks and the field of theme park studies. It identifies and discusses relevant economic, social, and cultural as well as medial, historical, and geographical aspects of theme parks worldwide, from the big international theme park chains to smaller, regional, family-operated parks. The book also describes the theories and methods that have been used to study theme parks in various academic disciplines and reviews the major contexts in which theme parks have been studied. By providing the necessary backgrounds, theories, and methods to analyze and understand theme parks both as a business field and as a socio-cultural phenomenon, this book will be a great resource to students, academics from all disciplines interested in theme parks, and professionals and policy-makers in the leisure and entertainment as well as the urban planning sector.