[As another
semester begins, so too does my annual Spring previews series, this time
focused on individual texts I’ll be teaching in spring courses. I’d love to
hear what your spring looks like and holds!]
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 thirteen 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 my most
recent Capstone section (in Spring 2016) 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 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 preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this post? Spring previews of your own to share?
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