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Opera
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 on 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 exercis...
Bodily Charm
Bodily Charm is a passionate defense of opera as a living as well as live art. Written for both the opera lover and the specialist by a physician and a literary critic, it is an accessible and engaging interdisciplinary exploration of the operatic body—both the actual physical bodies of the singers and audience members and the represented body on stage in operas such as Death in Venice, Salome, Rigoletto, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Elektra.
Cultural Narratives of Old Age in the Lives, Work, and Reception of Old Musicians
Operating largely within the world of European-American classical music, this book discusses the creative work of old musicians—composers, performers, listeners, and scholars—and how those forms of music- making are received and understood. Like everything else about old age, music-making is usually understood as a decline from a former height, a deficiency with respect to a youthful standard. Against this ageist mythology, this book argues that composing oldly, performing oldly, and listening oldly are distinctive and valuable ways of making music—a difference, not a deficit; to be celebrated, not ignored or condemned. Instead of the usual biomedical or gerontological understanding of...
Four Last Songs
Later life is a fraught topic in our commercialized, anti-aging, death-denying culture. Where does creativity fit in? The canonical composers whose stories are told in this book--Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), Richard Strauss (1864-1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)offer radically individual responses to that question. In their late years, each of these national icons wrote an opera around which coalesced major issues about their own creativity and aging, ranging from declining health to the critical expectations that accompany success and long artistic careers. They also had to deal with the social, political and aesthetic changes of their time, including Wor...
Rape at the Opera
The most-performed operas today were written at least a hundred years ago and carry some outdated and deeply problematic ideas. When performed uncritically, the misogyny, racism, and other ideologies present in many of these works clash with modern sensibilities. In Rape at the Opera, Margaret Cormier argues that production and performance are vital elements of opera, and that contemporary opera practitioners not only interpret but create operatic works when they put them onstage. Where some directors explicitly respond to contemporary dialogues about sexual violence, others utilize sexual violence as a surefire way to titillate, to shock, and to generate press for a new production. Drawing ...
Essays on the Song Cycle and on Defining the Field
This volume assembles twelve interdisciplinary essays that were originally presented at the Second International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Ann Arbor, MI, in 1999, a conference organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The contributions to this volume focus on two centres of interest. The first deals with general issues of literature and music relations from culturalist, historical, reception-aesthetic and cognitive points of view. It covers issues such as conceptual problems in devising transdisciplinary histories of both arts, cultural functions of opera as a means of reflecting postcolonial national identity, the problem of verbalizing music...
Fifty Key Literary Theorists
Covering over a century's worth of debate, thinking and writing about literature, this is a unique guide to the lives and works of fifty theorists who have left an indelible mark on literary studies. Featuring theorists such as Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Edward Said, this accessible guide includes: a glossary of terms full cross-referencing for maximum ease of use authoritative guides to further reading on and by each theorist. An essential resource for all students of literature, Fifty Key Literary Theorists explores the gamut of critical debate, from the New Critics to the Deconstructionists, and from post-colonialism to post-Marxism and more.
Italian Opera in Global and Transnational Perspective
This volume of essays discusses the European and global expansion of Italian opera and the significance of this process for debates on opera at home in Italy. Covering different parts of Europe, the Americas, Southeast and East Asia, it investigates the impact of transnational musical exchanges on notions of national identity associated with the production and reception of Italian opera across the world. As a consequence of these exchanges between composers, impresarios, musicians and audiences, ideas of operatic Italianness (italianit...) constantly changed and had to be reconfigured, reflecting the radically transformative experience of time and space that throughout the nineteenth century turned opera into a global aesthetic commodity. The book opens with a substantial introduction discussing key concepts in cross-disciplinary perspective and concludes with an epilogue relating its findings to different historiographical trends in transnational opera studies.
Critical Humanities and Ageing
Providing a critical humanities approach to ageing, this book addresses new directions in age studies: the meaning and workings of "ageism" in the twenty-first century, the vexed relationship between age and disability studies, the meanings and experiences of "queer" aging; the fascinating, yet often elided work of age activists; and, finally, the challenges posed by AI and, more generally, transhumanism in the context of caring for an ageing population. Divided into four parts: Part I: What Does It Mean to Grow Old? Part II: Aging: Old Age and Disability Part III: Aging, Old Age, and Activism Part IV: Old Age and Humanistic Approaches to Care the volume provides an innovative, two-part structure that facilitates rather than merely encourages interdisciplinary collaboration across the humanities and social sciences. Each essay is thus followed by two short critical responses from disciplinary viewpoints that diverge from that of the essay’s author. Drawing on work from across the humanities - philosophy, fine arts, religion, and literature, this book will be a useful supplemental text for courses on age studies, sociology and gerontology at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
Operatic Migrations
This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying a wide range of subjects associated with the creation, performance and reception of 'opera' in varying social and historical contexts from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Each essay addresses migrations between genres, cultures, literary and musical works, modes of expression, media of presentation and aesthetics. Although the directions the contributions take are diverse, they converge in significant ways, particularly with the rebuttal of the notion of the singular nature of the operatic work. The volume strongly asserts that works are meaningfully transformed by the manifold circumstances of their creation and receptio...
