Call for Expressions of Interest
THE OPERATIC: an interdisciplinary symposium looking at the concept of "the operatic" in contemporary culture.
Organised by the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies and the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre, University of Sussex.
Friday May 19, 2017
"THE OPERATIC"
Writing in their book "Opera's Second Death" (2001) Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar argue that opera is dead, but that it lives on as the un-dead: "If opera were simply over it could be assigned a neat place in cultural archaeology and thus properly buried. The astounding thing is the enormous operatic institution's stubborn, zombielike existence after its demise. The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes. Opera remains a huge relic, an enormous anachronism, a persistent revival of a lost past, a reflection of the lost aura, a true postmodern subject par excellence."
This symposium will consider the post-demise dispersion of opera in the cultural forms of the "operatic": those aspects of contemporary culture that borrow from opera to signify categories such as the "high", the "kitsch", the "camp", the "sublime", the "queer", the "histrionic"; the use of "operatic" as a critical term (Adorno - Hamlet is "operatic"; Coppola's and Scorsese's films are "operatic"; Kusturica's early work is "an operatically weird blend of magic realism, punk aesthetics and Yugoslav history"); Gramsci's critique of the "operatic conception of life" in relation to Italian politics; re-mediations of opera in popular culture (e.g. as music for films and advertisements); opera as signifier of transcendence, disease or death in films such Shawshanks Redemption, Philadelphia, Fatal Attraction; operatic voices as backing tracks for pop songs; reality TV shows like Pop Star to Opera Star; the operatic "scoring" of experience - music as heightened soundtrack to everyday life; the operatic elements of soap opera and horse opera. What and why does modern culture draw from the afterlife of opera?
Keynote speaker: Professor John Storey, University of Sunderland. Author of What is Cultural Studies? (1996), Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture (2009), Culture and Power in Cultural Studies(2010); Utopian Desire (forthcoming), and 'Expecting Rain: Opera as Popular Culture?' in Jim Collins (ed.), High-Pop, (2001).
Please send proposals for 20-minute papers (approx 100 words) or queries to Nick Till, Director, Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre
([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) by Friday January 6th 2017.
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Professor Nicholas Till
Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange
Director, Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre
School of Media, Film and Music
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN
"The world turns on its dark side." Michael Tippett, A Child of Our Time, written in reponse to Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, 1938.
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Professor Nicholas Till
Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange
Director, Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre
School of Media, Film and Music
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN
"The world turns on its dark side." Michael Tippett, A Child of Our Time, written in reponse to Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, 1938.
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