Linda Hutcheon – författare

The postmodern novel was a surprisingly and often poorly understood phenomenon of the 1980s and 90s, in which many artists explored issues of how art represents the world. These works are characterized by a certain self-reflexivity, a determination to foreground the process of artistic creation, and the previously often backgrounded role played by the artist. Linda Hutcheon's groundbreaking exploration of postmodernism in Canadian fiction, first published in 1988, provides a clear and fascinating explanation of this tendency towards self-consciousness and self-parody in many of the novels of this period. Her original choice of a cover design by artist Nigel Scott is a clue to the self-reflexive nature of postmodern art, and is reproduced again in his new edition of Hutcheon's excellent study. The Canadian Postmodern examines the theory and practice of postmodernism as seen through both contemporary cultural theory and the writings of Audrey Thomas, Michael Ondaatje, Robert Kroetsch, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Jack Hodgins, Aritha Van Herk, Leonard Cohen, Susan Swan, Clark Blaise, George Bowering, and others. Includes a new preface by Aritha van Herk that looks back on Hutcheon's key contributions to the field of postmodern fiction in Canada - and how this phenomenon looks some twenty years later.

Aging and creativity can seem a particularly fraught relationship for artists, who often face age-related difficulties at a time when their audience's expectations of their talents are at a peak. In Four Last Songs, Linda and Michael Hutcheon explore this issue through close looks at those who created some of the world's most important and influential operas. Giuseppe Verdi (1813 - 1901), Richard Strauss (1864 - 1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908 - 92), and Benjamin Britten (1913 - 76) all wrote operas late in life, pieces that reveal radically individual responses to the challenges of growing older. Verdi's Falstaff, his only comedic success, combated the influence of Richard Wagner by introducing young Italian composers to a new model of national music. Strauss, on the other hand, struggling with personal and political problems in Nazi Germany, composed the self-reflexive Capriccio, a "life review" of opera and his own musical legacy. Though it exhausted him physically and emotionally, Messiaen finished at the age of seventy-five his first and only opera, Saint Francois d'Assise, which marked the religious and aesthetic pinnacle of his career.Britten, meanwhile, suffered from heart problems at the end of his career and raced against time, refusing to undergo surgery until he had completed his masterpiece, Death in Venice. For all four composers, age, far from sapping the power of creativity, provided impetus for some of their most impressive accomplishments. The diverse stories presented here provide unique insight into the attitudes and cultural discourse surrounding creativity, aging, and late style. With its deft treatment of these composers' final years and works, Four Last Songs provides a valuable look at the challenges - and opportunities - that present themselves as artists grow older.

Aging and creativity can seem a particularly fraught relationship for artists, who often face age-related difficulties as their audience's expectations are at a peak. In Four Last Songs, Linda and Michael Hutcheon explore this issue via the late works of some of the world's greatest composers. Giuseppe Verdi (1813 1901), Richard Strauss (1864 1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908 92), and Benjamin Britten (1913 76) all wrote operas late in life, pieces that reveal unique responses to the challenges of growing older. Verdi's Falstaff, his only comedic success, combated Richard Wagner's influence by introducing young Italian composers to a new model of national music. Strauss, on the other hand, struggling with personal and political problems in Nazi Germany, composed the self-reflexive Capriccio, a "life review" of opera and his own legacy. Though it exhausted him physically and emotionally, Messiaen at the age of seventy-five finished his only opera, Saint Fran ois d'Assise, which marked the pinnacle of his career. Britten, meanwhile, suffering from heart problems, refused surgery until he had completed his masterpiece, Death in Venice.For all four composers, age, far from sapping their creative power, provided impetus for some of their best accomplishments. With its deft treatment of these composers' final years and works, Four Last Songs provides a valuable look at the challenges and opportunities that present themselves as artists grow older.

In this major study of a flexible and multifaceted mode of expression, Linda Hutcheon looks at works of modern literature, visual art, music, film, theater, and architecture to arrive at a comprehensive assessment of what parody is and what it does.Hutcheon identifies parody as one of the major forms of modern self-reflexivity, one that marks the intersection of invention and critique and offers an important mode of coming to terms with the texts and discourses of the past. Looking at works as diverse as Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Brian de Palma's Dressed to Kill, Woody Allen's Zelig, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Hymnen, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Magritte's This Is Not a Pipe, Hutcheon discusses the remarkable range of intent in modern parody while distinguishing it from pastiche, burlesque, travesty, and satire. She shows how parody, through ironic playing with multiple conventions, combines creative expression with critical commentary. Its productive-creative approach to tradition results in a modern recoding that establishes difference at the heart of similarity.In a new introduction, Hutcheon discusses why parody continues to fascinate her and why it is commonly viewed as suspect-–for being either too ideologically shifty or too much of a threat to the ownership of intellectual and creative property.

First published in 1988. Postmodernism is a word much used and misused in a variety of disciplines, including literature, visual arts, film, architecture, literary theory, history, and philosophy. A Poetics of Postmodernism is neither a defense nor a denunciation of the postmodern. It continues the project of Hutcheon's Narcissistic Narrative and A Theory of Parody in studying formal self-consciousness in art, but adds to this both a historical and ideological dimension. Modelled on postmodern architecture, postmodernism is the name given here to current cultural practices characterized by major paradoxes of form and of ideology. The poetics of postmodernism offered here is drawn from these contradictions, as seen in the intersecting concerns of both contemporary theory and cultural practice.

The edge of irony, says Linda Hutcheon, is always a social and political edge. Irony depends upon interpretation; it happens in the tricky, unpredictable space between expression and understanding.Irony's Edge is a fascinating, compulsively readable study of the myriad forms and the effects of irony. It sets out, for the first time, a sustained, clear analysis of the theory and the political contexts of irony, using a wide range of references from contemporary culture. Examples extend from Madonna to Wagner, from a clever quip in conversation to a contentious exhibition in a museum.Irony's Edge outlines and then challenges all the major existing theories of irony, providing the most comprehensive and critically challengin theory of irony to date.

The edge of irony, says Linda Hutcheon, is always a social and political edge. Irony depends upon interpretation; it happens in the tricky, unpredictable space between expression and understanding.Irony's Edge is a fascinating, compulsively readable study of the myriad forms and the effects of irony. It sets out, for the first time, a sustained, clear analysis of the theory and the political contexts of irony, using a wide range of references from contemporary culture. Examples extend from Madonna to Wagner, from a clever quip in conversation to a contentious exhibition in a museum.Irony's Edge outlines and then challenges all the major existing theories of irony, providing the most comprehensive and critically challengin theory of irony to date.

This classic text remains one of the clearest and most incisive introductions to postmodernism. Perhaps more importantly, it is a compelling discussion of why postmodernism matters. Working through the issue of representation in art forms from fiction to photography, Linda Hutcheon sets out postmodernism's highly political challenge to the dominant ideologies of the western world. A new epilogue traces the fate of the postmodern over the last ten years and into the future, responding to claims that it has, once and for all, 'failed'.Together with the new epilogue, this edition contains revised notes on further reading and a fully updated bibliography. This revised edition of The Politics of Postmodernism continues its position as essential reading.

This classic text remains one of the clearest and most incisive introductions to postmodernism. Perhaps more importantly, it is a compelling discussion of why postmodernism matters. Working through the issue of representation in art forms from fiction to photography, Linda Hutcheon sets out postmodernism's highly political challenge to the dominant ideologies of the western world. A new epilogue traces the fate of the postmodern over the last ten years and into the future, responding to claims that it has, once and for all, 'failed'.Together with the new epilogue, this edition contains revised notes on further reading and a fully updated bibliography. This revised edition of The Politics of Postmodernism continues its position as essential reading.

A Theory of Adaptation explores the continuous development of creative adaptation, and argues that the practice of adapting is central to the story-telling imagination. Linda Hutcheon develops a theory of adaptation through a range of media, from film and opera, to video games, pop music and theme parks, analysing the breadth, scope and creative possibilities within each.This new edition is supplemented by a new preface from the author, discussing both new adaptive forms/platforms and recent critical developments in the study of adaptation. It also features an illuminating new epilogue from Siobhan O’Flynn, focusing on adaptation in the context of digital media. She considers the impact of transmedia practices and properties on the form and practice of adaptation, as well as studying the extension of game narrative across media platforms, fan-based adaptation (from Twitter and Facebook to home movies), and the adaptation of books to digital formats.A Theory of Adaptation is the ideal guide to this ever evolving field of study and is essential reading for anyone interested in adaptation in the context of literary and media studies.

A Theory of Adaptation explores the continuous development of creative adaptation, and argues that the practice of adapting is central to the story-telling imagination. Linda Hutcheon develops a theory of adaptation through a range of media, from film and opera, to video games, pop music and theme parks, analysing the breadth, scope and creative possibilities within each.This new edition is supplemented by a new preface from the author, discussing both new adaptive forms/platforms and recent critical developments in the study of adaptation. It also features an illuminating new epilogue from Siobhan O’Flynn, focusing on adaptation in the context of digital media. She considers the impact of transmedia practices and properties on the form and practice of adaptation, as well as studying the extension of game narrative across media platforms, fan-based adaptation (from Twitter and Facebook to home movies), and the adaptation of books to digital formats.A Theory of Adaptation is the ideal guide to this ever evolving field of study and is essential reading for anyone interested in adaptation in the context of literary and media studies.

This study has a double focus: in the first place, it seeks to chart the parallel re-evaluation of both formalism and psychology in twentieth-century literary theory by using the work and career of the French literary critic, Charles Mauron (1899-1966) as a scaffolding. Using a structure of biography and literary history, it investigates Mauron's rather odd position, both inside and outside two different critical contexts, the French and the English, a position that makes his work a particularly revealing reflection of the diverse critical trends and tensions of our age. The second focus of this study is suggested in the tension in Mauron's work created by his need to objectivise the subjective. The recent conflicts between continental and British criticism or, more generally, between the new formalism (represented by structuralism and semiotics) and the liberal humanist tradition raise an important contemporary issue prefigured in Mauron. The broader context of his work is that of the eternal theoretical debate regarding the designation of literary criticism as an objective or a subjective activity, as a science or as the ultimate human and humane act.

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 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.

These readings are organized into four sections. The first explores the wellsprings of the debates in the relationship between the postmodern and the enterprise it both continues and contravenes: modernism. Here philosophers, social and political commentators, as well as cultural and literary analysts present controversial background essays on the complex history of postmodernism. The readings in the second section debate the possibility-or desirability-of trying to define the postmodern, given its cultural agenda of decentering, challenging, even undermining the guiding "master" narratives of Western culture. The readings in the third section explore postmodernism's complicated complicity with these very narratives, while the fourth section moves from theory to practice in order to investigate, in a variety of fields, the common denominators of the postmodern condition in action.

"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.