Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 272-295).

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 302-324).

This ethnography re-elaborates omertà as something more than a code of honor enforced through an oath of secrecy among members of the Neapolitan camorra and ordinary underemployed individuals in their midst. On appearance, this study is a fetishized and even eroticized search for determinacy or "meaning" performs what Sedgwick (1997) calls "strong theory" or a hermeneutics of suspicion bent on exposure. Having arrived, it seems, at the center of determinacy, the ethnography hints at now being able to tell the "real" story of the camorra and omertà. However, the stories it tells along the way take the camorra and omertà as not only "real", concrete objects (institution and code, respectively), but also (and primarily) their scattered, radial effects/affects in the surrounding zone where the the camorra and ordinary Neapolitans make contact. These stories do not sum these fragments up as omertà's constituent parts with the goal of capturing them in a singular, sovereign, minimalist and generalizing "conceptual economy". Rather, they maintain contact with the everyday grain in which these fragments are embedded. This ethnography takes omertà as a part of everything rather than an objectifiable, identifiable thing. It tracks its livelihood across various domains and registers, everywhere all the time in everyday life for ordinary individuals living in the zone of contact with the camorra. It loiters in this zone where scarce resources, fierce competition, volatile power balances and unreliable state authority render day-to-day life particularly indeterminate. It participates in the practices of negotiating personal livelihood under such constraints--practices that ordinary individuals call the art of making do. This ethnography follows and engages individuals as they perform the art of making do. It pays simultaneous attention to that art's aesthetic, economic and affective dimensions by looking specifically at the moral/political economy of two potent popular performance genres, the sceneggiata and its contemporary descendant, neomelodica music. It finds that for ordinary Neapolitans affects and interests are inextricably intertwined in shared sensibilities, in popular style, and more broadly in the aesthetics of everyday life. It finds that this everyday aesthetics is bound in complex ways to its excessive limit, the camorra. These accounts describe this complex bond as an affective community. / text

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

The present work examines the poetry in neapolitan language and particularly the works of E. A. Mario, fin de siecle poet and melody writer, who contributed considerably to the song history. / The first part introduces us to the neapolitan regional poetry as well as to its language to finally conclude with the poetry set to music: the song. The ideal atmosphere is the cafe-chantant. The poets of the time including Salvatore Di Giacomo and the generation after are surveyed. / The second part deals with the author. It describes his life, his art and his works, rich of popular and especially classical elements, which crowned him with success.

No description available.

The dwindling supply of castrati created a crisis in the opera world in the early 19th century. Castrati had dominated opera seria throughout the 18th century, but by the early 1800s their numbers were in decline. Impresarios and composers explored two voice types as substitutes for the castrato in male leading roles in serious operas: the contralto and the tenor. The study includes data from 242 serious operas that premiered in Italy between 1800 and 1840, noting the casting of the male leading role for each opera. At least 67 roles were created for contraltos as male heroes between 1800 and 1834. More roles were created for tenors in that period (at least 105), but until 1825 there is no clear preference for tenors over contraltos except in Naples. The Neapolitan preference for tenors is most likely due to the influence of Bourbon Kings who sought to bring Enlightenment values to Naples. After the last castrato retired in 1830 and the casting of contraltos as male heroic leads falls out of favor by the mid-1830s, the tenor, aided by a new chest-voice dominant style of singing, becomes the inheritor of the castrato's former role as leading man in serious Italian opera.