Linda Hutcheon

Bio: Linda Hutcheon is an academic researcher from University of Toronto. The author has contributed to research in topics: Postmodernism & Opera. The author has an hindex of 27, co-authored 146 publications receiving 8146 citations. Previous affiliations of Linda Hutcheon include National Autonomous University of Mexico & McMaster University.

Syphilis, sin and the social order: Richard Wagner's Parsifal

Abstract: surprising focus of this discussion (by a literary theorist and a physician) of suffering and social decline in the context of sexually transmitted disease is Richard Wagner's last music drama, Parsifal, finally completed in 1882 and called a Biihnenweihfestspiel (a stage consecration festival play) for his Bayreuth theatre. Parsifal presents that familiar story of the simple and pure young Parsifal's eventual redeeming of the (sexual) sin of Amfortas, the keeper of the Holy Grail. Wagner's obvious source was the earlier romance of Wolfram von Eschenbach itself connected through its source, Chretien de Troyes, to stories of the worship of nature and the rites of godly death and rebirth that reverberate through early myths of Adonis to the Celtic legends of the maimed Fisher King ruling over the 'Waste Land' and on into Christian legend. Wagner's Amfortas also has a wound that, like Christ's, is in his side; in the sources, it is not. Wagner's transposition of the wound from the genital area to the chest, while obviously offering a gain in Christian symbolism, also serves to distract attention: it displaces, but never totally obliterates, the sexual origins of the injury. In Chretien's text, the Fisher King's incurable wound, euphemistically placed 'between his legs', is made by a javelin; in Wolfram's version, it is caused by a poisoned lance in his scrotum - and, of course, by the 'pursuit of love beyond the restraints of wedlock', which in turn 'brought harm to the world'.' Crime and punishment go together: a poisoned, festering wound in the genitals is deemed apt punishment for riding out alone to seek adventure 'under Love's compulsion'. That nothing could cure the wound is interpreted as a sign from God Himself. Though placed in his side, not lower, Amfortas's wound in Wagner's tale was nevertheless inflicted as he sank into the arms of the beautiful Kundry; it is also significant that it is made by his own spear - the sacred Spear of Longinus that had been given by the angels to his father, Titurel, along with the Holy Grail. Christian

In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 1982.

Abstract: Introduction 1. Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle 2. Images of Relationship 3. Concepts of Self and Morality 4. Crisis and Transition 5. Women's Rights and Women's Judgment 6. Visions of Maturity References Index of Study Participants General Index

The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

Abstract: To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

The Post-Colonial Studies Reader

Abstract: The essential introduction to the most important texts in post-colonial theory and criticism, this second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include 121 extracts from key works in the field. Leading, as well as lesser known figures in the fields of writing, theory and criticism contribute to this inspiring body of work that includes sections on nationalism, hybridity, diaspora and globalization. The Reader's wide-ranging approach reflects the remarkable diversity of work in the discipline along with the vibrancy of anti-imperialist writing both within and without the metropolitan centres. Covering more debates, topics and critics than any comparable book in its field, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader is the ideal starting point for students and issues a potent challenge to the ways in which we think and write about literature and culture.