<< I've got two posts in me ... and I just wrote the third | Front Page | Radiohead Derails Science >>
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Do You Do the Police in Different Voices?
A conversation with The Little Womedievalist about how to teach drama-qua-drama in the classroom brought to mind how I taught Introduction to Drama lo those many years ago.
I problematized gender from the start, slyly assigning males to read the female roles and vice versa. I knew the students would be uncomfortable reading anyway—this way, not only would they be uncomfortable, they’d be dramatically interpellated into roles they might otherwise think and write reductively about. This approach worked best not in the aforelinked course, but another in which I opened with The Oresteia and worked forward to Twelfth Night. On the first day devoted to Shakespeare, the entire class—which, to my delight, had keened to my scheme—demanded to know who would be reading Viola and Cesario. I had set the stage for a discussion of gender which would not (and did not) alienate conservative students likely to complain of the inherent liberal bias of their patently liberal instructor. (I may have been teaching canonical literature, but why Twelfth Night? Why not Hamlet? Oddly, the three openly conservative in the course I linked to said nary a word about Clifford Odet’s Waiting for Lefty and the adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here—but that’s a discussion for another post.)
I know that gender should be an issue central to any introductory discussion of Elizabethan drama, but Horowitz and his ilk have all pumps primed, fit to burst. The first mention of “gender” or “sexuality” invites a chorus of complaint. (Had I been half the teacher I think I am, I would’ve incorporated this outpouring of communal outrage into an introduction to a key dramatic device; but alas, teaching is nothing if not a perpetual exercise in staircase wit.) Forcing the students to adopt, to understand unaccustomed roles before the plays raise issues of gender and sexuality counter-primes the students, compelling them to see these issues to be inherent instead of imposed.
The ruse worked on both the classroom and conceptual level. The students enjoyed their own and fellow classmates’ performances and learned about the immanence of questions of gender and sexuality in literary studies. But my success here was contingent, not of general pedagogical value to those whose Introductions to Drama include plays which don’t thematize the issues as Twelfth Night does. So I ask—for others as much as myself—how do you teach drama in literature courses? Do you, as one of my colleagues put it, teach plays as “performed novels” and ignore the quirks particular to the genre? Or do you incorporate performance into the classroom, not only acknowledging what distinguishes dramatic pieces from poetic or novelistic but demonstrating how those differences are meaningful?
[A final, Microsoft Word-inspired anecdote: Word wanted the first clause of the sentence beginning “Had I been half the teacher I think I am” to read “Had I been half the teacher me think I be.” I must admit—sometimes Word has an impeccable ear for the musicality of prose. Would that it could stomach grammar.]
Comments
In my “British Literature to 1798” survey course, I teach three plays: Mankind, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Sheridan’s School for Scandal. Half of each play’s Monday lecture is devoted to a discussion of the particular theatrical space in which a contemporary performance of the play would have taken place. This sets the stage for the Friday discussion sections devoted to Mankind and School (the Mid-Term takes the discussion section’s place during the week we read Faustus). The students are asked to write short response papers addressing some aspect of the staging and/or blocking of selected scenes from the plays. The TAs then make use of these responses in getting the students to stage the scenes in class. I’ve observed this process several times now and find it very effective in communicating that plays are not novels.
"problematized gender” and “interpellated into roles”? Really now, do you need to inject theory into your blog? Do you lecture with this language to your students?I just read you are at Irvine, oh it all makes sense now…
Of everyone those who have ever injected theory into anything, I—above all others—am most guilty.
My lectures are nothing but streams of the purest-quality jargon, brewed fresh from the clearest muddledest mountain lakes.
I don’t think “problematized gender” even counts as theory. I learned about that one in high school church camp (granted, Unitarian.)
I love how “theory” is often attacked for being too abstract to possibly apply to anything but also attacked whenever it appears too interwoven into everday discussions of practical matters. It’s as though this stuff is by its nature impossible to actually understand or believe on your own initiative, it is actually just some kind of virus of the mind. Beware literary types using technical sounding words, they’re infected. I can’t decide if anonymous_student’s second sentence is a “you’d expose innocent people to this?” type of thing or a “you’d use that language in front of your children?” thing.
As an undergrad, I had a professor who introduced the performance aspect of drama by doing this:
He handed out copies of the lyrics for Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice,” and we read them out loud. (Sadly, but significantly, almost no one was familiar with the song.) He then played three different performances of the song, including the stripped-bare acoustic version and the reggae version from Live at Budokan. The discussion about performance was great becuase, for undergrads, it made more immediate sense than trying to detect subtle changes in various RSC productions of King Lear.
I thought this was a great way to get students to understand that each performance becomes its own text apart from the words on the page
I have tried having students read plays aloud in class, but then ended up hating it too much to read whole plays together that way. Any actor knows how much reading, re-reading, multiple interpretation, experimentation with timing, and rhetorical examination go into any performance that makes sense. No matter how good the text of a play is, it is sure to become boring when voiced by college students who were assigned a part five seconds before they began to read. I once took a class as an undergrad in the Theater department in which we enjoyed reading the plays together, but most of the students had acting experience and we knew what parts we’d be assigned the next day, so we could prepare.
The last few times I taught Twelfth Night, we read aloud parts of the complex comedic scenes, which aren’t very funny on the page but are pretty hilarious even on a cold reading. I used the Bedford Texts and Contexts edition, which provides historical sources instead of “theory” for the gender, religious, musical, and legal content of the discussion. Obviously, these sources are only there because of “theory,” but students are less resistant to discussion of it because they can’t accuse us of introducing it out of some kind of academic perversity.
Rob, where do you think Mankind would have been staged? I’m of the school that sees Mankind as imitating a tavern’s courtyard--iirc--rather than actually having been performed in such a place. In other words, it’s a play that also performs its staging.
Karl, I’ve seen the arguments for innyard performance, and I don’t buy them. My preference is for great hall performance, with the tavern mentions referring to the “off-stage” area behind the screens leading to the kitchens and pantry.
Just to clarify I wasn’t whining about theory as if to say “think about the children!” It is just that some of the jargon is overused. When I hear undergrads throwing around “interpellate” in response to their their teacher’s railing against hegemony everyday I feel that they are the ones who have been interpellated into a hegemony. Does some theory perhaps stifle intellectual thought? (Marx, I’m looking at you!) Yes, I believe it does. I don’t mean to sound cranky, but where is the dialogue? I’ve spent too much time listening to (mostly) political lectures in which most students do not understand what is being said or know why the selected words have the power that they do. I did love reading Althusser, although perhaps it was just the shared experience of being a former Catholic that brought me the most enjoyment from it.