Branigin Lecturers, Linda and Michael Hutcheon

Creative to the End: Staging Aging
Thursday, November 18, 2004, BLTV 251

From fairy tales (and operas about them) to novels, from paintings to movies, western art forms have represented growing up—and growing older—in realist, idealized, and/or stereotyped ways. This illustrated lecture will look at the history of these cultural representations. It will also explore links between creativity and age by looking at the last works and late style of operatic composers like Verdi, Wagner, Britten, Janáček, and Strauss.

Linda Hutcheon is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto and a renowned literary and cultural critic best known for her extensive writings on postmodern theory and feminism. Her research interests also extend into art, architecture, and modern philosophy. Michael Hutcheon is Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Together, they have co-written three books on opera (Opera: Desire, Disease, Death, 1999; Bodily Charm: Living Opera, 2000; Opera: The Art of Dying, 2004). By combining literary and scientific discussions, they engage in an interdisciplinary exploration of operatic languages and metaphors from historical and cultural points of view. They probe such subjects as disease, death and the art of dying, desire, and representations of the operatic body both on stage and among audiences.