[ecrea] CFP: "The Operatic"

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: The
Politics of Signification (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) to
Nick Till, Director, Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre
((n.till /at/ sussex.ac.uk) <mailto:(n.till /at/ sussex.ac.uk)>) by Friday January 6th 
2017.
Call for Expressions of Interest

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