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.

Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern: A Dialogue

Abstract: Linda Hutcheon says that this article is a dialogue that was initially provoked by some ruminations on her part over why she had resolutely insisted that the postmodern was more ironic than nostalgic. This dialogue with Mario Valdes represents her attempt to deal with this unfinished business to try to understand why she had earlier chosen the nostalgic dimension of the postmodern in favor of the ironic. It also represents Valdes response to this position and his critical testing of it on the field of contemporary Spanish cinema.

Rethinking literary history : a dialogue on theory

Abstract: Preface: Theorizing Literary History in Dialogue 1. Rethinking the National Model 2. Rethinking Literary History and Racial Memory 3. Rethinking the History of Literary History 4. Rethinking the Scale of Literary History 5. Rethinking the Colonial Model Afterword: A Personal Response

Opera: Desire, Disease, Death

Abstract: "Opera is a fascinating interdisciplinary study of the interconnected subtexts of erotic attraction, illness, and death in several 19th and 20th century operatic texts...This is an extraordinary examination of how opera uses the singing body-gendered and sexual-to give voice to the suffering person. Highly recommended." - "Library Journal." "The authors' argument is rich and complex; it draws on source, text and music; it is also medically sound. Opera is quintessentially an art of love and desire, of loss and suffering, of disease and death. Hutcheon and Hutcheon enrich our understanding of both content and context." - Opera News. "Linda and Michael Hutcheon have done a fine job of pulling together medical and literary sources to make sense of the changing depiction of disease in opera...For opera lovers and for anyone interested in seeing good, synthetic reasoning at work, this is a fine study." - Publishers Weekly. Linda Hutcheon is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author of, most recently, "Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony". Michael Hutcheon, M.D., is a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. His many articles have appeared in "American Review of Respiratory Disease" and other journals."

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.

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.