Deviant Opera

Deviant Opera
Author: Axel Englund
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520343255
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Imagine Armida, Handel’s Saracen sorceress, performing her breakneck coloraturas in a black figure-hugging rubber dress, beating her insubordinate furies into submission with a cane, suspending a captive Rinaldo in chains from the ceiling of her dungeon. Mozart’s peasant girl Zerlina, meanwhile, is tying up and blindfolding her fiancé to seduce him out of his jealousy of Don Giovanni. And how about Wagner’s wizard, Klingsor, ensnaring his choir of flower maidens in elaborate Japanese rope bondage? Opera, it would appear, has developed a taste for sadomasochism. For decades now, radical stage directors have repeatedly dressed canonical operas—from Handel and Mozart to Wagner and Puccini, and beyond—in whips, chains, leather, and other regalia of SM and fetishism. Deviant Opera seeks to understand this phenomenon, approaching the contemporary visual code of perversion as a lens through which opera focuses and scrutinizes its own configurations of sex, gender, power, and violence. The emerging image is that of an art form that habitually plays with an eroticization of cruelty and humiliation, inviting its devotees to take sensual pleasure in the suffering of others. Ultimately, Deviant Opera argues that this species of opera fantasizes about breaking the boundaries of its own role-playing, and pushing its erotic power exchanges from the enacted to the actual.

Rape at the Opera

Rape at the Opera
Author: Margaret Cormier
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2024-01-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0472903632
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The most-performed operas today were written at least a hundred years ago and carry some outdated and deeply problematic ideas.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 on archival footage as well as attendance at live events, Cormier analyzes productions of canonic operas from German, Italian, and French traditions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, including Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Don Giovanni, La forza del destino, Un ballo in maschera, Salome, and Turandot. In doing so, Cormier highlights the dynamism of twenty-first-century opera performance practice with regard to sexual violence, establishes methods to evaluate representations of sexual violence on the opera stage, and reframes the primary responsibility of opera critics and creators as being not to opera composers and librettists but to the public.

Pasticcio opera in Britain

Pasticcio opera in Britain
Author: Peter Morgan Barnes
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2024-07-09
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1526165171
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This study overturns twentieth-century thinking about pasticcio opera. This radical way of creating opera formed a counterweight, even a relief, to the trenchant masculinity of literate culture in the seventeenth century. It undermined the narrowing of nationalism in the eighteenth century, and was an act of gross sacrilege against the cult of Romantic genius in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, it found itself on the wrong side of copyright law. However, in the twenty-first century it is enjoying a tentative revival. This book redefines pasticcio as a method rather than a genre of opera and aligns it with other art forms which also created their works from pre-existing parts, including sculpture. A pasticcio opera is created from pre-existing music and text, thus flying in face of insistence on originality and creation by a solo genius.

A Poetics of Handel's Operas

A Poetics of Handel's Operas
Author: Nathan Link
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2023-03-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197651364
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What should we consider when thinking about the relationship between an onstage performance and the story the performance tells? A Poetics of Handel's Operas explores this question by analyzing the narratives of Handel's operas in relation to the rich representational fabric of performance used to convey them. Nathan Link notes that in most storytelling genres, the audience can naturally discern between a story and the way that story is represented: with film, for example, the viewer would recognize that a character hears neither her own voiceover nor the ambient music that accompanies it, whereas in discussions of opera, some audiences may be distracted by the seemingly artificial nature of such conventions as characters singing their dialogue. Link proposes that when engaging with opera, distinguishing between the performance we see and hear on the stage and the story represented offers a meaningful approach to engaging with and interpreting the work. Handel's operas are today the most-performed works in the Baroque opera seria tradition. This genre, with its intricate dramaturgy and esoteric conventions, stands to gain much from an investigation into the relationships between the onstage performance and the story to which that performance directs us. In his analysis, Link offers theoretical studies on opera and narratological theories of literature, drama, and film, providing rich engagement with Handel's work and what it conveys about the relationship between text, story, and performance.

Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange (ICLACE 2023)

Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange (ICLACE 2023)
Author: Bootheina Majoul
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2023-08-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 2384760947
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This is an open access book. The 4th International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange (ICLACE 2023) will be held on May 19–21, 2023 in Hangzhou, China. Culture includes language, which is a special cultural phenomenon. For culture, most scholars agree that it mainly includes two aspects: material culture and spiritual culture. Specific examples to show cultural phenomena will be of great benefit to our understanding. Some examples of material culture are listed here: Indian women wear saris, Japanese like to eat sashimi, and Chinese like to shake hands when meeting each other. These are various manifestations of material culture in different nations. Language is the mode of transmission of culture. Language is one of the most important ways of thinking and cultural exchange of human beings, which is actually the manifestation of the formation and transmission of culture. Because of thinking, human beings gradually create culture in the continuous social practice, and then spread their national culture to each other in the continuous language exchange. Since ancient times, art and culture have been going hand in hand and complementing each other. On the one hand, art is an important connotation and component of culture, and the progress of art is the driving force of cultural development. On the other hand, culture is the source and content of art, and the prosperity of culture is the key to improve the level of art. On the other hand, culture is the source and content of art, and the prosperity of culture is the key to improving the level of art. Therefore, whether it is culture or art, it is not only a symbol of an era, a representation of people’s life style, but also a guide to the direction of social development. The relationship between language, art and cultural communication is a hot topic for many scholars to study at present. Therefore, an academic conference is set up for authors to discuss related research issues and exchange new ideas, hoping that scholars can burst out more excellent and valuable ideas in this conference. ICLACE 2023 is to bring together innovative academics and industrial experts in the field of Literature, Art and Cultural Exchange research to a common forum. The primary goal of the conference is to provide a platform for scientists, scholars, and engineers from all over the world to present ongoing research activities, fostering the research and business relations and promoting scientific information interchange and cooperation between all the participants.

Contexts of Deviance

Contexts of Deviance
Author: J. William Spencer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2014-09-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199973571
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While most readers focus more on deviance than sociology, Contexts of Deviance: Statuses, Institutions, and Interactions brings sociology front and center by examining deviance and social control in their social contexts. This fresh and innovative anthology shows students how deviance and control can be studied at different levels of analysis and from a range of theoretical approaches using different methodologies. The collection is divided into six parts: theory, social control, statuses and identities, institutions, subcultures, and social movements. The readings range from classic to contemporary pieces, from macro-level studies to studies of face-to-face encounters. Contexts of Deviance also represents a wide range of theoretical traditions--from functionalist and critical to post-modern and interactionist. Introductions in each section help students to understand what it means to study deviance and control in a social context, to appreciate research questions at different levels of analysis, and to recognize how a positivist orientation is different from a subjectivist orientation. An instructor's manual and test bank prepared by Thomas N. Ratliff (Arkansas State University), Jessica Middleton (University of California at Irvine), and Ashley Swan (Arkansas State University) are available for qualified instructors.

Arts of Incompletion

Arts of Incompletion
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-07-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004467122
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Incompletion is an essential condition of cultural history, and particularly the idea of the fragment became a central element of Romantic art which continued being of high relevance to the various strands of modernist and contemporary aesthetics.

Masculinity in Opera

Masculinity in Opera
Author: Philip Purvis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1136182152
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This book addresses the ways in which masculinity is negotiated, constructed, represented, and problematized within operatic music and practice. Although the consideration of masculine ontology and epistemology has pervaded cultural and sociological studies since the late 1980s, and masculinity has been the focus of recent if sporadic musicological discussion, the relationship between masculinity and opera has so far escaped detailed critical scrutiny. Operating from a position of sympathy with feminist and queer approaches and the phallocentric tendencies they identify, this study offers a unique perspective on the cultural relativism of opera by focusing on the male operatic subject. Anchored by musical analysis or close readings of musical discourse, the contributions take an interdisciplinary approach by also engaging with theatre, popular music, and cultural musicology scholarship. The various musical, theoretical, and socio-political trajectories of the essays are historically dispersed from seventeenth to twentieth- first-century operatic works and practices, visiting masculinity and the operatic voice, the complication or refusal of essentialist notions of masculinity, and the operatic representation of the ‘crisis’ of masculinity. This volume will not only enliven the study of masculinity in opera, but be an appealing contribution to music scholars interested in gender, history, and new musicology.

Strategies of Deviance

Strategies of Deviance
Author: Earl Jackson, Jr.
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1995-06-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780253115232
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"Juxtaposing the narrative strategies of Freud, Wilde and Jarman; film pornography and Almodovar; and Dennis Cooper, Robert GlÃ1⁄4ck and Kevin Killian, Jackson offers a delightfully intelligent and inventive reappraisal of key issues in gay representation." -- Gay Times "A major event in gay cultural theory.... the feat of critical imagination is absolutely stunning in its scope and power. [This book] will be definitive in laying out the issues for subsequent writers in gay theory." -- David M. Halperin Earl Jackson examines visual and narrative texts from a variety of genres, including case histories, pornography, science fiction, and experimental prose.