Richard Paul Knowles
It is only too easy to read and/or write as a born-again poststructuralist/Marxist and still teach like an unregenerate New Critic.
Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor Reproducing Shakespeare 1
This paper makes some suggestions
towards the development of a pedagogy and a curriculum for the teaching
of Canadian drama from a materialist perspective in which the pretence
of 'proper scholarly detachment' is replaced by an acknowledgement and
analysis of the nature of our engagement. This involves interrogating the
historical, social, cultural and institutional forces at work in the construction
both of curricula and of our own reading lists, in the writing and teaching
of histories, and in the interpretation of performance texts. It also involves
'teaching differences' in the classroom, viewing both texts read and their
interpreters as historically and otherwise contingent sites of struggle.
In recent years there has been a shift in emphasis in the study of drama and theatre away from what one knows to what one does; from an empirical knowledge of texts to an understanding of methodologies; and from a study of universal and unchanging meaning embodied in Playtexts that are seen as canonical or striving-to-be-canonical, to a study of the material conditions for the textual production of meaning in specific historical and cultural contexts. This shift has not yet made much impact on classrooms and curricula, however, where historical surveys and New-Critical analyses still dominate, naturalizing and therefore perpetuating inscribed ideologies and interests while attempting to maintain a critical stance that has been constructed as 'proper scholarly detachment.' Non-traditional approaches and materials are accommodated by 'expanding' the canon and curriculum - including in anthologies, courses, and curricular offerings 'extra' materials produced by or about groups that have hitherto been excluded, and thereby assimilating and often neutralizing them in a warm but fuzzy soft-core liberal pluralism.
It is my purpose here to make some suggestions for a pedagogy and a curriculum for the teaching of Canadian drama and theatre from a materialist perspective in which the pretence of detachment is replaced by an acknowledgement and analysis of the nature of our engagement. To be honestly and openly 'otherwise engaged' - to be political - is to emphasize and interrogate the historical, social, and cultural forces at work in the construction of our own reading lists and course offerings even as we teach. In the study of Canadian drama and theatre this means interrogating the field itself: on one level, to study Canadian drama and theatre at all is to be 'otherwise engaged' - to bring a 'particularist' 2 perspective to bear on the study of theatre; but on another and perhaps more problematic level the concept of nationalism that has been an integral part of the construction of hegemonic canons is fundamental to the very existence of 'Canadian Drama and Theatre' as an area of study.
In the classroom, the 'resisting teacher' of Canadian drama and theatre is faced with a daunting challenge. Undergraduates arrive at University in the 1990s with considerable visual sophistication and with some skill at reading realistic narrative, but without the specialized skills that are involved in reading and interpreting scripts as pre-texts (rather than prescripts), in reading and interpreting theatrical productions and performances as texts, or in recognizing the constructed and ideological nature of dramatic representation. The undergraduate instructor must further confront in his or her students deeply imbedded assumptions about 'universal' truths immanent in transcendent (and rarely Canadian) 'masterpieces,' expressive of the determinable intentions of great authors, and understood by autonomous and ahistorical subjects encountering those texts and interpreting them 'freely' and 'objectively.'
A materialist pedagogical practice would shift the emphasis in dramatic literature classes from the 'close reading' of American New Criticism, which considers, 'objectively,' the construction and language of plays as independent and ahistorical objects - allowing them, supposedly, to speak for themselves - to another kind of close reading which probes tensions and fissures within texts and includes examining the interests served by the various theatrical, social and cultural discourses with and through which the texts speak. 3 It would move away from teaching students how to adopt correct or appropriate subject positions (usually white, middle-class, heterosexual, and male) 4 from which 'properly' to understand the plays, to the teasing out of meaning from the negotiations between texts and subjects (or selves as constructs), where both text and subject are seen as historically and otherwise contingent sites of struggle. It would move away from constructing unities to, as one recent Shakespearean has put it, 'teaching differences,' 5 including differences of culture, race, gender, orientation, and background among the students.
Locating a text and a classroom in history is, of course, quite different from the traditional approach to history in dramatic literature or theatre history classrooms. Dramatic Literature courses rarely teach plays in history (as part of a complex of social and cultural forces), few teach the interpretation of texts as an act taking place in history, and few teach the history of 'Dramatic Literature' (as an inquiry into the politics of canon formation and period construction). 6 Rather they tend to offer 'potted' histories of dominant ideas and movements that supposedly characterize the period in which the writer of the script lived, ideas and movements that are passively reflected in the works studied. Courses in theatre history, particularly Canadian theatre history, tend to offer surveys using a developmental teleology and privileging a collection of value-free 'facts' over any attempt to interrogate how and in what context those facts mean, or how they are constructed or contained by the implicit or explicit narratives of the course itself. But the study of dramatic texts within history may be conceived as the interrogation of one among many cultural practices, and one whose material conditions of production, and whose place within the social formation, effect its production and dissemination of meaning and ideology.
To teach Canadian drama and theatre is to concern oneself with a particular kind of otherness. In spite of efforts by anthologists, cultural nationalists and others over the past two decades to construct a Canadian national canon of dramatic literature that reflects 'the Canadian identity,' and contributes both to a national mythology and eventually - always eventually - to an international theatrical mainstream (and therefore to a dominant culture), there is a decreasing likelihood, as we enter its last decade, of the 20th century's ever becoming the century of Canada (or of anybody else). This is not a bad thing, partly because it provides us with opportunities in the classroom to interrogate Canadian and other theatre from a perspective that is clearly and consciously problematic. E.D. Blodgett noted in a recent article on Mavis Gallant - somewhat problematically, in its construction of woman as metaphor - that
A Canadian is, it would seem, by nature [sic] of but not in, and thus endowed with attributes similar to those of a woman in a patriarchal world. To accept these conditions is to become, by definition, a heretic, refusing the official version, whose text consequently becomes the articulation of such a state, such a country. Life and history, as [Janice Kulyk] Keefer has remarked, happen to Canadians elsewhere. 7
If the self is not itself free from
versions of itself - if it is, as Lacan would have it, a discourse - the
search for identity, national as well as individual, is the search for
a text. In studying Canadian drama and theatre in the Canadian classroom
we are almost unavoidably 'otherwise engaged,' and because the concept
of a Canadian identity or of 'Canada' itself is so clearly fraught, we
are almost inevitably acknowledging the indeterminacy of the texts read
and the texts reading.
A course that attempts to integrate the study of playtexts, theatrical practices and conditions, and social forces, will not, of course, provide 'coverage' in the way that traditional survey courses do, but will occupy itself much of the time with theorizing the grounds of its own undertaking, and interrogating the assumptions, responses and perspectives of the students themselves. This of course has implications for the curriculum as a whole. On this level, the politicized educator is faced with the difficulty of constructing a course of study based on concepts and methods rather than content, within an educational structure that is increasingly dominated by the perceived need to disseminate information (the metaphor is neither accidental or incidental). S/he is faced with the tendency of curricula to reproduce 'authoritative' (and usually imported) models in which are inscribed ideological forces that work to preserve a hegemonic institutional, social, cultural and political status quo. Finally, s/he is faced with the difficulty of reshaping an educational structure which for practical and other reasons privileges the literary script as text.
In developing a new Drama curriculum at the University of Guelph a committee made up of various constituencies within the department, including students, set out to reorganize our offerings along conceptual rather than empirical lines, assuming that even in practical courses 'facts' and techniques are neither neutral nor value free. We also tried to problematize the approaches and selections of material in each of our courses in order to highlight the constructed nature of the courses themselves. We tried as far as possible to integrate the various strands of the programme at both the programme and course levels, in order that dramatic literature, theatre history, theatrical organization, acting, directing, design and technical theatre were seen to be interrelated and interdependent, and in order to avoid the frequent circumstance in which the literary (or academic) and the practical sides of a programme are segregated and often antagonistic. Finally we wanted openly to privilege Canadian drama and theatre throughout the curriculum by indicating in the university calendar that 'the drama department has a particular interest in the drama and theatre of Canada. Course offerings will reflect this concentration where appropriate.' (In addition to this use of Canadian material across the curriculum, our Introduction to Theatre and Applied Criticism courses involve attending Canadian productions, and we offer regular Canadian courses at the third- and fourth-year level.)
Setting aside film courses, which are under review as potentially part of an interdisciplinary programme or institute, our first-year offerings - which are prerequisites for all later courses - consist of 'Introduction to Theatre' and 'Script Analysis I. The former involves attendance at six productions, and deals with the nature and function of drama and theatre in society, as well as the role and function of different aspects of theatre in production, including playwriting, directing, acting, design and technical theatre. It concerns itself with the societal and cultural role played by theatre, and with how theatre is produced and produces its effects; and it is designed to introduce students to ways of discussing, analyzing, and writing about the theatrical event. 'Script Analysis I,' on the other hand, is concerned with the different ways in which critics, directors, actors and designers read and analyse scripts, and it is designed to focus closely on a limited number of playtexts. All Guelph drama students are in this way introduced in their first year to the study of Canadian theatrical productions as texts, and to methodologies for reading scripts as pre-texts.
Beyond the first year, the curriculum offers a series of courses, with increasing specialization, in Acting and Directing; Technical Theatre and Design; and Theatre History, Criticism, and Theory; together with courses on Theatre for Young Audiences, Applied Criticism of Theatre in Production, Theatrical Organization, Script Analysis II, Scenography, and Playwriting, with a series of seminars at the fourth-year level, and the opportunity to do one or both of an Honours Essay or Honours Project in Theatrical Production.
There are four courses that may serve as examples for the purposes of this paper of how the curriculum should function at the course level, apart from its cumulative attempt to integrate various aspects of the discipline, to problematize approaches and methods, and to focus on methodologies and ways of thinking rather than empirical coverage. These are the course on Applied Criticism, the third-year course on Script Analysis, the full-year course at the third-year level on Concepts and Techniques of Theatrical Design, and the third-year course on Theatrical Organization. 'Applied Criticism' is an upper-level course on the analysis of theatrical production in both journalistic reviews and scholarly articles, maintaining the curriculum's focus on the production text by taking advantage of local productions. 'Script Analysis II' has as co-requisite enrolment in a upper-level course that involves work for course credit in any capacity on a department production. It will bring together actors, directors, stage managers, designers and technical personnel working on a show in a detailed classroom analysis, from a variety of divergent approaches, of the script under production. 'Concepts and Techniques of Theatrical Design,' a full-year course at the third-year level, integrates the study of design techniques (sets, costumes, lights and sound) with design theory and practice in relation to specific scripts or other pre-texts in specific production circumstances, and is a prerequisite for a fourth-year course in Scenography. Finally, 'Theatrical Organization' is designed to introduce students to and interrogate various theatrical structures and their relationship to work produced through them, structures ranging from stage management, through administrative models in various kinds of theatre, to the structuring of artistic responsibilities, and finally such things as boards, government bodies, and funding organizations. 8
Neither I as a teacher nor other members of the University of Guelph Drama Department have begun to approach solving the problems posed by teaching in the context of institutionally and disciplinarily inscribed ideologies and power structures, nor is it either possible or desirable to find any kind of 'permanent' solution to these problems: the deconstructive process should be ongoing. In both the classroom and the curriculum, however, I hope to have suggested in these remarks that it is both possible and desirable to be 'otherwise engaged,' and to engage in a kind of subversive teaching that openly and self-consciously problematizes its methods. As an educator committed to the position that 'the pedagogical is political,' with no desire to reproduce hegemonic structures and subjects, and no desire to construct monolithic anti-hegemonic practice, the struggle - not to mention the difficulty in finding textbooks-is for me ongoing: that's the point.
Notes
Forum - OTHERWISE ENGAGED: TOWARDS A MATERIALIST PEDAGOGY
Richard Paul Knowles
I would like to thank Ann Wilson for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this paper.
1 JEAN E HOWARD and MARION
F O'CONNOR eds, Reproducing Shakespeare: The Text in History and Ideology
(London: Methuen 1987) p 5
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2 For a discussion of 'particularism'
in the context of Canadian theatre see ROBERT WALLACE, 'Being Particular'
in his book Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada
(Saskatoon:
Fifth House 1990) pp 7-19
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3 See HOWARD and O'CONNOR
p 6
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4 BARBARA HERNSTEIN SMITH
in 'Contingencies of Value' in ROBERT VON HALLBERG ed, Canons (Chicago:
Univ of Chicago Press 1984) p 27, argues that 'by providing [students]
with "necessary backgrounds," teaching them "appropriate skills," "cultivating
their interests," and, generally, "developing their tastes," the academy
produces generation after generation of subjects for whom the objects and
texts thus labelled do indeed perform the functions thus privileged, thereby
insuring the continuity of mutually defining canonical works, canonical
functions, and canonical audiences.'
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5 EDWARD PECHTER, 'Teaching
Differences,' Shakespeare Quarterly vol 41 no 1 (Summer 1990) pp
160-174
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6 See HOWARD and O'CONNOR
p 7
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7 E D BLODGETT, 'Heresy
and Other Arts: A Measure of Mavis Gallant's Fiction,' Essays on Canadian
Writing vol 42 (Winter 1990) p 5. Blodgett is citing JANICE KULYK KEEFER,
'Mavis Gallant and the Angel of History,' University of Toronto Quarterly
vol 55 no 3 (Spring 1986) p 289
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8 Since the curriculum
was put forward it has occurred to us that, while gender issues are intended
to be included among the material conditions considered as part of all
courses, women, lesbians and gays are potentially contained and/or
marginalized by the curriculum as we designed it. Consequently, in spite
of our decision not simply to ghettoize these subjects in what I
think of as 'a course of one's own,' in a quiet corner of the curriculum
where it won't bother anyone, we have nevertheless begun to explore ways
of including a course or courses on such things as 'Feminist Theatre,'
'Gender in the Theatre,' and so on, and thereby both to highlight gender
issues across the curriculum and offer specialized gender-based
courses. The ongoing debate between cultural materialists and feminists
was in this way brought close to home
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