The other class I'm prepping for aside from two sections of script analysis is a grad seminar in contemporary theatre history and lit. I've taught the course several times before. It's one of several classes scheduled to be reformatted in a revision of the PhD curriculum currently in process. Lord willing, this is the last time this course will be taught.
There's nothing wrong with studying theatre history and lit from a particular era. Our current curriculum requires many such classes. PhD students have to travel through about six semesters' worth of history from ancient times (Egypt, India, Greece, etc.) to the present. That's the model we instructors were all trained in. But we've decided to move away from "encyclopedic survey of theatre/performance history." That goal was based in a prior vision of what a PhD in Theatre was for--a generalized expert who knew a bit of everything even if they specialized in one particular thing. All of us trained in this model felt prepared to teach seminars and classes on any era of theatre or performance.
Yet years of actually trying to fulfill that Renaissance person role taught us the gaps between expectation and reality. The version of "theatre history" we were taught--the history we supposedly became experts in--turns out to be pretty limited, restricted mainly to Europe and North America. To be sure, there's plenty of theatre and performance in those locations. But they're hardly the whole world.
You can see the field of theatre history slowly rousing itself from a Euro/American (specifically Euro/USA-nian) stupor over the last three decades. Successive editions of theatre history texts and drama lit anthologies have grown larger and longer, the authors discovering whole new continents and hemispheres equally full of performance practices and traditions. Every year, those of us trained in theatre and performance have become more and more aware of and uncomfortable with the holes in our picture of "world theatre history." Each semester we tried to fit more and more material into the same already overcrowded syllabi and semesters. The classic syllabus question--What do I leave out?--takes on a new poignancy when you recognize how much has always been left out of our traditional historical narratives.
Thus, our program--like many of our peer programs--decided to relinquish the notion of encyclopedic knowledge, a core of facts or canon of texts that every graduate of a PhD Theatre program should know. We're shifting away from a seminar-by-seminar march through theatre history; there's no realistic way to do justice to such a history. Instead we're adopting an openly piecemeal approach, a curriculum composed of modular special-topics courses from different eras and focused on different themes.
Assigned a seminar whose catalog title is "Theatre from World War II to the Millennium," then, I'm trying already to wrest the class away from its place in the old order. I'm instead shaping the seminar around the question of what a dramatic literature class can or should do. I've advertised the course especially to folk in sibling disciplines like English, Comparative Lit, and History. "Suppose you're assigned the 'Modern Drama' class," I wrote in the blurb I passed around to other grad programs in my university. "What do you teach?"
Underpinning this question are a host of others. What is theatre for? Why study dramatic literature? What plays or playwrights should we study? Do we include practices that aren't so text-centric? Are those practices even literature? What criteria might guide us as we design classes and reading lists? What role if any should the canon play? Is that idea even useful anymore? Do we lose anything by jettisoning the values canons purported to champion--universality, quality, timelessness--or are those concepts irredeemably contaminated with hegemonic and oppressive systems? On the other hand, given human limits on time and attention, is there any way not to have some kind of functional canon, a focus on some plays and not others? What then might an ethical practice of canonicity look like?
Hopefully I can harness the energy of such big questions to create a coherent, interesting, and rewarding seminar.
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