[This week marks
the final classes of the Spring 2016 semester, so this week on the blog I’ll
offer some semester reflections, focusing on new texts or ideas I tried in my
courses. I’d love to hear your spring reflections and any other pedagogical or
personal perspectives you’d share!]
On two distinct
but complementary reasons to teach more drama in lit courses.
The first
literature course I ever got to teach was an Introduction to Literature, in my
fourth semester of teaching as a grad student at Temple University, and I
naturally included a unit on drama, featuring both Hamlet and Death
of a Salesman. My second literature course was Six American Authors, an
American lit survey I was fortunate enough to teach while adjuncting
at UMass Boston, and I once again featured a dramatic work, this time Langston Hughes’s Mulatto. Yet in my eleven years at
Fitchburg State, I’ve consistently struggled to include dramatic works in my
literature courses, outside of one
section of our American Drama course; it’s only been in Approaches to
English Studies (our sophomore-level Gateway course) and English Studies
Capstone (our culminating senior-level course) that I’ve found room on the
syllabus for drama.
For this
semester’s Capstone section I replaced Death
of a Salesman (which I had taught in every prior Capstone of mine) with a
much more contemporary play, Annie Baker’s The Flick (2013), a recommendation from
my colleague
and friend Joe Moser. It’s a wonderful play, funny and relevant and ultimately
deeply moving, and we had a lot of fun discussing and performing it in our
final unit of the semester. And as we did so, I realized two reasons why I want
to find room for drama in my American lit courses as well. For one thing, you
can’t read or teach drama without including those aforementioned performances,
in order to help analyze acting, staging, audience, and all the related issues
so central to dramatic works. And while I feature student voices and
presentations in a variety of ways in every literature course, there’s quite
simply nothing like having a group of students standing and moving and
interacting in performance, and having all of us in the class both help direct
and respond to those performative moments.
Baker’s wonderful
play also reminds us—even when we’re just reading and discussing it more calmly
at our desks—of the distinctive qualities of human voice and identity that
dramatic works can capture far differently from other literary genres. Dialogue
is of course an important part of fiction (and sometimes
poetry) as well; but as Baker’s use of pauses and fragments, interruptions
and arguments, monologues and silences, and many other elements illustrates, drama
can use dialogue (complemented by stage directions, and some of Baker’s are
among my favorite such directions ever) with a depth and compelling potency all
its own. If one of the main reasons we read and teach literature is to help
engage with the human condition in all its complexity and universal significance—and
I’d put that close to the top of the list why we do so—then dramatic texts add
to that work in ways that, quite simply, would otherwise be minimized if not entirely
absent from our classrooms. Teaching The
Flick has reminded me of that fact, and I look forward to the tough but
important work of making room for more dramatic works in my other literature
courses.
Next reflection
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Responses to this idea or others you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment