Perspectives on Opera and the Operatic (NeMLA)
Salve Regina University, Newport, RI
Organization: Northeast Modern Language Association
Event: NeMLA
In the four hundred years since its invention in Renaissance Florence, opera has become synonymous with the grandiose, the excessive, and the melodramatic, yet it has only gained a foothold in the academy as an object of serious academic study within the past fifty years. Since then, however, an abundance of scholarship has yielded everything from formal musicological readings of operatic works to theoretical inquiries inspired by psychoanalysis into voice and performance. And topics like the relationship between opera and sovereignty in seventeenth century Italy and the appropriation of Wagner by the Third Reich underscore how opera has never been far from the political sphere in the Western world. But as Slavoj Zizek confirms, “the more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.” Opera’s story may be one of perpetual decadence, but contemporary creators deserving of academic attention push against the narrative and economic forces that have challenged the validity of opera as an artform in the 21st century.
This panel seeks to complement contemporary scholarship on opera across the humanities by soliciting papers that speak to opera’s unique, overdetermined, and intrinsically interdisciplinary blend of words, music, performance, and history, as well as papers that examine operatic genealogies extant in non-operatic texts. Potential panelists are also invited to think across languages, borders, and performance traditions and consider the important social and political questions of canonicity, representation, and ownership as they pertain to opera and the operatic.
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22414
Harry Rose