Showing papers by "Linda Hutcheon published in 2004"

Opera: The Art of Dying

Abstract: Our modern narratives of science and technology can only go so far in teaching us about the death that we must all finally face. Can an act of the imagination, in the form of opera, take us the rest of the way? Might opera, an art form steeped in death, teach us how to die, as this provocative work suggests? In Opera: The Art of Dying a physician and a literary theorist bring together scientific and humanistic perspectives on the lessons of living and dying that this extravagant and seemingly artificial art imparts. Contrasting the experience of mortality in opera to that in tragedy, the Hutcheons find a more apt analogy in the medieval custom of contemplatio mortis - a dramatized exercise in imagining one's own death that prepared one for the inevitable end and helped one enjoy the life that remained. From the perspective of a contemporary audience, they explore concepts of mortality embodied in both the common and the more obscure operatic repertoire: the terror of death (in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites); the longing for death (in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde); preparation for the good death (in Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung); and suicide (in Puccini's Madama Butterfly). In works by Janacek, Ullmann, Berg, and Britten, among others, the Hutcheons examine how death is made to feel logical and even right morally, psychologically, and artistically - how, in the art of opera, we rehearse death in order to give life meaning.

On the art of adaptation

Abstract: hence will delay the onset of the kind of global climate changes that are liable to turn El Niño into a serious hazard. Our affair with El Niño is approaching a critical juncture. Constant El Niño could soon become 1⁄2ckle. Will he grow more intense? Will his brief visits become prolonged? As yet we have no de1⁄2nite answers. But we have learnt that much can be done to avoid calamities by implementing appropriate policies, even when the available scienti1⁄2c information has large uncertainties. Above all, we need to guard against the temptation to defer dif1⁄2cult political decisions because of a perceived need for more accurate information. Much more can be learnt from our affair with El Niño. We need to do so in a hurry, before we succeed in changing him. Despite the argument implicit in Spike Jonze’s latest 1⁄2lm, Adaptation, every age can justly claim to be an age of adaptation. The desire to transfer a story from one medium or one genre to another is neither new nor rare in Western culture. It is in fact so common that we might suspect that it is somehow the inclination of the human imagination–and, despite the dismissive tone of some critics, not necessarily a secondary or derivative act. After all, most of Shakespeare’s plays were adapted from other literary or historical works, and that does not seem to have damaged the Bard’s reputation

Displacement and Anxiety: Empire and Opera

Abstract: Despite Edward Said’s extensive analysis of the manifestations of Orientalism in European culture, music receives little of his attention. Yet he had a strong interest in the art form and frequently used musical imagery in his critical language.1 His formal treatment of empire and opera, for instance, was confined to a discussion of the genesis—and not the music or narrative—of Verdi’s Aida in Culture and Imperialism.2 Like him, many have written about nineteenth-century Paris as the hub of Orientalist study and even more specifically about the French Romantic taste for the exotic and the Orientalist in literature (Nerval’s Voyage en Orient or Hugo’s Les Orientales) and in the visual arts (the paintings of Delacroix or Ingres). Ralph Locke and Susan McClary, among others, have discussed the nature and politics of the exotic in French music in general.3 Many have made the obvious generalizations about the link between colonialism and Orientalism, but few have tied the overt operatic explorations of imperialism directly and concretely to the historical fact that France was an active colonial power in North Africa and the Islamic Middle East in the middle and late nineteenth century.4