Opera by Michael Hutcheon
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.Mark A. Cheetham is a professor of art history at the University of Toronto. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Art Journal Award, he is the author of a dozen books, volumes, and exhibition catalogues, most recently Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: The Englishness
of English Art Theory since the Eighteenth Century (2012) and co-curator of Jack Chambers: The Light From the Darkness / Silver Paintings and Film (2011). Linda Hutcheon is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She has published a long list of books, including A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988), The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of
Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (1992), and A Theory of Adaptation (2006). She has also co-authored three books on opera, medicine, and culture with Michael Hutcheon, MD.
| SKU | Nicht verfügbar |
| ISBN 13 | 9780674013261 |
| ISBN 10 | 0674013263 |
| Titel | Opera |
| Autor | Michael Hutcheon |
| Serie | Convergences: Inventories Of The Present |
| Buchzustand | Nicht verfügbar |
| Bindungsart | Hardback |
| Verlag | Harvard University Press |
| Erscheinungsjahr | 2004-03-23 |
| Seitenanzahl | 256 |
| Hinweis auf dem Einband | Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden. |
| Hinweis | Nicht verfügbar |