Do You Do the Police in Different Voices?

(x-posted from the Valve )

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

[Andrew R.]

Hmm... If a Muslim student felt compelled to attack a problematizing of gender on a religious basis, would that make it the Butlerian Jihad?

*Ducks, runs*

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Appropriately, the visual image conjured by someone running while ducked resembles waddling.

UPDATE: That should have been "waddling." The image of someone "swaddling" on the run is quite different.

[Mike Russo]

I feel rather ignorant -- I hadn't known Morning Becomes Eclectic was a pun until I clicked through to the syllabus. Now I'm stuck wondering whether in fact this is one of those things everybody knows and doesn't need to mention, which is why I've never heard of it...

[Vance Maverick]

"Keened"? Was that another MSWord suggestion? I'm trying to figure out what it was starting with. Perhaps you had "was keen on", and Word told you to recast it in the active voice?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Quick! Everyone come laugh at Mike, who'd heard of but didn't catch the pun in the title of an infrequently performed mid-20th Century American play! Heap derision, now!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Vance, I actually thought about that one, and decided to go with "keened" instead of "grown keen to" because I liked the play on "keen." (That sentence originally abutted the one about the "chorus of complaint," so were this something more than a post, I'd probably have revised it.)

Also, the OED approved (somewhat) of "to render keen." I realize now that "had grown keen to my scheme" bounces the rhythm better, but it's not as if my usage is particularly opaque.

[nnyhav]

Had only MSWord proposed that a perpetual exercise in staircase wit could be better expressed as the wit of the StairMaster® ... (and I had so enjoyed your play on 'to wit' not so long ago ...)

[Anna Hiller]

Interesting that you should ask about teaching drama in the classroom, as I've been thinking about this with some frequency. I had the odd experience of teaching an exclusively female drama ("The House of Bernarda Alba" by Federico Garcia Lorca) to a class with a large proportion of young men. I wanted them to do an impromptu performance, but I realized that there was going to be an inherent problem in getting *male* volunteers. What I ended up doing was have the men in the class take the part of exterior elements, in this case, the ringing of bells and other ambient sounds. While they weren't very enthusiastic at first, having them perform in that non-verbal way drew even more attention to the idea of theater as "spectacle"--an element that I continually emphasize when teaching theater. It is *not* meant to be a "performed novel". Theater is literature in its most sensual incarnation.

[Dr. Crazy]

I don't teach a course that solely focuses on drama, but in my classes in which I do incorporate plays, I tend to split the difference between the "performed novels" approach and incorporating performance in the classroom. My reasons for this have to do with the following: 1) with many of the plays that I teach, it's a challenge just to get students to figure out what's going on content-wise. Sometimes we can get at that through performance, but other times it takes careful close reading of the text to get the layers of meaning, so the emphasis changes depending on the play. 2) I like to talk about the differences between reading a play in a literature class and the expectations in that forum vs. going to see a play. Part of what's interesting for me about teaching drama is talking about the ways in which literary critics themselves can elide the centrality of performance to the genre, and so we spend some time talking about what literary critics look for in a play vs. what an actor might look for or what an audience member might look for in seeing a performance. 3) the best play I know for teaching about drama as a performed genre is Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine. The play actually demands that males take female roles and vice versa, and it also requires doubling of roles between act I and act II. Because the play demands this, it's very easy for students to understand how choices about which roles are doubled and the sex/race of particular characters influence how we "read" the play.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Anna:

While they weren't very enthusiastic at first, having them perform in that non-verbal way drew even more attention to the idea of theater as "spectacle."

I hadn't thought of that, but that's mostly because I haven't thought too seriously about the idea of theater as spectacle...but you're right. That'd be another way to draw students in -- what I especially like about this approach is that it would involve them thinking like directors, trying to find ways to complement and/or add nuance to scenes, which would require them to know what needed complement or nuance.

It is *not* meant to be a "performed novel". Theater is literature in its most sensual incarnation.

I think most English professors know this, but as English professors instead of Theater professors, they're at a loss as to how to treat it as such.

Dr. C.:

Part of what's interesting for me about teaching drama is talking about the ways in which literary critics themselves can elide the centrality of performance to the genre, and so we spend some time talking about what literary critics look for in a play vs. what an actor might look for or what an audience member might look for in seeing a performance.

I spent an inordinate amount of time discussing this in my courses, and I always wondered whether it wasn't a little unproductive from the students' p.o.v. After all, they're not there to be introduced to how literary-critics-like-their-instructor-read-dramatic-works but Drama-with-a-capital-d. While it's heartening to see that other people have the same conversation -- and consider it, as I did, productive -- I wonder whether our interests weren't better served by it. (Not attacking you, obviously, just airing my own anxieties about that particular conversation.)

[Dr. Crazy]

I'm back to this late, but to respond quickly: I think it's productive for them because ultimately what we talk about when we talk about "Literature" is something that critics construct. In an intro to lit course, I think it's important for them to interrogate why we would study a shakespeare play instead of Grease (for example) - who makes that decision that one is "literature" whereas the other is merely popular? From there to talking about how literary critics view drama vs. how actors or directors might view drama isn't that great a leap. I guess to me "introduction to literature" isn't just about introducing students to literary texts - it's an introduction to what we mean by literature - to the category itself. And if one teaches it that way, well, then one's got to talk at least a little bit about how critics have constructed "literature" as a category.