Showing papers by "Linda Hutcheon published in 2006"

A Theory of Adaptation

Abstract: Preface to the 1st Edition Preface to the Revised Edition Chapter 1 Beginning to Theorize Adaptation What? Who? Why? How? Where? When? Familiarity and Contempt Treating Adaptations as Adaptations Exactly What Gets Adapted? How? Double Vision: Defining Adaptation Adaptation as Product: Announced, Extensive, Specific Transcoding Adaptation as Process Modes of Engagement Framing Adaptation Chapter 2 What? (Forms) Medium Specificity Revisited Telling - Showing Showing - Showing Interacting - -Telling or Showing Cliche #1 Cliche #2 Cliche #3 Cliche #4 Learning from Practice Chapter 3 Who? Why? (Adapters) Who Is the Adapter? Why Adapt? The Economic Lures The Legal Constraints Cultural Capital Personal and Political Motives Learning from Practice Intentionality in Adaptations Chapter 4 How? (Audiences) The Pleasures of Adaptation Knowing and Unknowing Audiences Modes of Engagement Revisited Kinds and Degrees of Immersion Chapter 5 Where? When? (Contexts) The Vastness of Context Transcultural Adaptation Indigenization Learning from Practice Why Carmen? The Carmen Story-and Stereotype Indigenizing Carmen Chapter 6 Final Questions What Is Not an Adaptation? What Is the Appeal of Adaptations? Epilogue by Siobhan O'Flynn

Interdisciplinary Opera Studies

Abstract: I hold this truth to be self-evident: that an art form consisting of a literary text, a dramatic stage performance, and music should be studied in all its multimedia and “multimediated” dimensions (Kramer, Opera 25). Today I can make this statement with confidence because the academic study of opera indeed covers all those aesthetic bases, but that has not always been the case. So long as opera fell primarily within the domain of musicology, it was studied first and foremost as music alone. The fact that the music was written for a specific dramatic text was not deemed particularly significant. The very name given to that text betrayed a belief in its secondariness: the diminutive libretto. But things have been changing: in recent years, some musicologists have challenged the dominant positivistic historicism and formalism of their discipline; some have even looked to literary theory for inspiration, bringing new approaches to the music of opera through narratology (e.g., Abbate) or semiotics (e.g., Nattiez). But just as important for opening up the study of opera as an aesthetic and cultural form has been the attention of scholars working in other disciplines. To take but one example, Peter Rabinowitz's rhetorical narrative theory introduced new ways of thinking about opera as narrative, not only as drama and, more pointedly, not only as drama with the composer in the role of dramatist (Kerman). It was opera, not dance, for example, that became a focus for interdisciplinary studies; already multimediated, it attracted diverse lines of inquiry. To cite the title of David Levin's groundbreaking 1994 volume, we can now see “opera through other eyes.” (Musical theater too has been seen through other—especially literary—eyes, but that is not the focus of this piece [see, e.g., Most; Miller; Rabinowitz].)

Adapting a Canonical Canadian Novel for the Operatic Stage: A Dystopia for Our Times

Abstract: A plain, cream-coloured leaflet listed the program for the day-long Opera Exchange symposium at the University of Toronto – ‘The Handmaid’s Tale: No Balm for this Gilead.’ From 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday 2 October 2004, a mixed audience of academics, students, and members of the general public assembled to hear a series of lectures and presentations on Margaret’s Atwood’s chilling futuristic novel turned opera. While the house lights are up and people are taking their seats and reading their programmes a proscenium-arch-filling Video Conference screen displays ... four moving ‘screen-savers’ [the first of which reads] ‘International Historical Association Convention, 20–25 June, 2195, Twelfth Symposium on the Republic of Gilead (Formerly the United States of America).’ (Ruders, xiv)