Burning The May Tree: The Sacrifice of Jim Morrison
Select Format
Select Condition 
Book Overview
Unlocks the history and significance of the rock band The Doors in terms of Jim Morrison's published poetry. A great way to get started with Jim's poetry and Doors history. The book isn't about The Doors per se, it's about a dynamic in modern culture. The Doors just were the first, best example of it. The idea is to let The Doors become a bridge to understanding that more vague-seeming subject.
Jim Morrison's posthumously published works of poetry offer a wonderful synthesis of Symbolist and Blakean poetics. What's more, they give us a window into an epic struggle for cultural change, and how it was suppressed.
The book was previously titled "The Mass Sacrificial Spectacle: The Doors in Poetry and History," and the original thesis won Stanford University's Robert Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities. The citation reads:
"Christopher Balz has produced a superb essay under the direction of Professor James Winchell of the Department of French and Italian. As a prudent and textually oriented researcher, Mr. Balz sets about an explication of the heretofore inexplicable sense-making systems in the poetry of Jim Morrison. He brilliantly ties together the Frankfurt School, the Situationism of Guy Debord, and the post-structuralist anthropology of Rene Girard in order to demonstrate, in light of the public reception and manipulating of the poet/shaman/commodity, the passage from labor to spectacle, from an industrial to a communication-oriented society. This essay is outstanding for its intellectually adventurous thrust, its commitment to l'imaginaire social, and its profound sense of responsibility." - Ewart A. C. Thomas, Dean of Humanities and Sciences, June 16, 1990, Stanford University
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
