“Based on a True Story: The Urge to Adapt History”

Linda Hutcheon
(Distinguished University Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto)

While adaptations of fictional stories obviously flourish in forms ranging from films to videogames, theme parks to musicals, so too do those taken from “real life.” The desire to transpose historical accounts from print to other media – including opera – is the subject of this illustrated exploration of how the human imagination works to tell and retell our favourite stories.

Linda Hutcheon is one of the contemporary world’s most dynamic scholars and thinkers in the humanities. She is a leading theoretician of postmodernism and has major interests in parody, irony, semiotics, feminism, modern fiction, contemporary Canadian culture, and opera. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has served as President of the Modern Language Association of America, and holds honorary doctorates from Concordia University, McMaster University, and the Universities of Western Ontario, Antwerp, and Ghent. She is associate editor of University of Toronto Quarterly, was co-editor of the 53-book Culture/Theory series published by University of Toronto Press, and currently co-edits the Medicine and Literature series published by the University of Illinois Press. She serves on the editorial board of more than twenty journals and has supervised or is supervising more than seventy doctoral candidates at the University of Toronto alone. Her books include Narcissistic Narrative (1980), Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic (1984), A Theory of Parody (1985), A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), The Canadian Postmodern (1988), The Politics of Postmodernism (1989, revised 2002), Splitting Images (1991), and Irony’s Edge (1994). With her husband Michael Hutcheon (a physician) she has recently co-authored three books on opera: Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (1996), Bodily Charm (2000), and Opera: The Art of Dying (2004). Her latest book is A Theory of Adaptation (Routledge, 2006).