Linda Hutcheon Livres

Opera is quin-tessentially an art of love and desire, of loss and suffering, of disease and death. This title offers an understanding of both content and context.

Working through the issue of representation, in art forms from fiction to photography, the author sets out postmodernism's political challenge to the dominant ideologies of the western world.

A Poetics of Postmodernism is neither a defense nor a denunciation of the postmodern. It continues the project of Linda Hutcheon's Narcissistic Narrative and A Theory of Parody in studying formal self-consciousness in art, but adds to this both an historical and an 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.

Linda Hutcheon, in this original study, examines the modes, forms and techniques of narcissistic fiction, that is, fiction which includes within itself some sort of commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic nature. Her analysis is further extended to discuss the implications of such a development for both the theory of the novel and reading theory. Having placed this phenomenon in its historical context Linda Hutcheon uses the insights of various reader-response theories to explore the “paradox” created by metafiction: the reader is, at the same time, co-creator of the self-reflexive text and distanced from it because of its very self-reflexiveness. She illustrates her analysis through the works of novelists such as Fowles, Barth, Nabokov, Calvino, Borges, Carpentier, and Aquin. For the paperback edition of this important book a preface has been added which examines developments since first publication. Narcissistic Narrative was selected by Choice as one of the outstanding academic books for 1981–1982.

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 François 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 [Publisher description]

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.

Investigates a broad range of contemporary fiction, film, and architecture to address the role of history in postmodern cultural productions.

The study explores the dual re-evaluation of formalism and psychology in 20th-century literary theory through the lens of Charles Mauron's career. It examines his unique position within both French and English critical contexts, highlighting how his work reflects the era's diverse critical trends. Additionally, it addresses the tension in Mauron's writing between objectivity and subjectivity, situating his contributions within the ongoing debate about the nature of literary criticism as either a scientific endeavor or a deeply humanistic pursuit.

V Teórii adaptácie skúma uznávaná literárna vedkyňa Linda Hutcheonová všadeprítomnosť adaptácii vo všetkých médiách. V súčasnom filme je samozrejme dosť adaptácií - vychádzajúcich takmer zo všetkého, od komiksov po romány Jane Austenovej - vďaka čomu sa pýtáme, či sa Hollywoodu minuli nové príbehy. No Hutcheonová tvrdí, že ak o adaptáciách uvažujeme len v románoch a filmoch, mýlíme sa. Dnes sa na vrcholy hudobných rebríčkov dostávajú nové hudobné spracovania piesní, existujú videoherné verzie rozprávok či dokonca horské dráhy, súvisiace s licenciami úspešných filmov. Adaptácia bola vždy centrálnym spôsobom rozprávania príběhov a zaslúži si štúdium v celej svojej šírke a rozsahu - ako proces tvorby a vnímania i ako produkt seba samej. Zaujímavá a poučná Teória adaptácie je odvážnym novým náhľadom na to, ako funguje adaptácia v rôznych médiách a žánroch, ktorý možno odpovie na odvekú otázku, či bola lepšia kniha, film, alebo opera či tematický komplex.